Muscovites Say They’re Less Affected by Putin’s War in Ukraine than do Russians Beyond the Ring Road, Levada Center Poll Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 9 – The shares of Russians who say they are not affected by Putin’s war in Ukraine and of those who say they are strongly affected have grown over the last three years for the country as a whole, the Levada Center says. But that divide conceals that Muscovites say they’re less affected than do Russians in smaller cities and villages.

            This pattern reflects Putin’s own efforts to keep the war from affecting the politically sensitive capital as much by using a far larger share of men from outside the capital than from within it and the differences inherent in life in the megalopolis and in smaller cities and especially villages where people are more likely to know what their neighbors are experiencing.

            According to the polling agency, the percentages of those who say they have been profoundly affected by the war and that of Russians who say they have not have both increased over the last two years (levada.ru/2025/09/09/konflikt-s-ukrainoj-vnimanie-podderzhka-otnoshenie-k-peregovoram-predstavleniya-o-srokah-spetsoperatsii-ee-vliyanie-na-zhizn-respondentov-v-avguste-2025-goda/).

            In January 2023, 16 percent of all Russians said they had been profoundly affected by the war and 34 percent said they had not been affected at all. Now, the former figure has increased to 22 percent and the latter to 40 percent. Adding those who had been somewhat affected and largely unaffected to these categories does not change this pattern.

            But the difference in the relationship between these two categories in Moscow and between the same two categories in smaller cities and villages are now striking different. 50 Percent of Muscovites said they had not been affected while 14 percent said they had been profoundly so.

            In smaller and mid-sized cities, 38 to 41 percent said they had not been affected by the war, while 19 to 24 percent said they had been profoundly affected. In villages, 40 percent said that they had not been affected, while 26 percent said they had been profoundly so, as the result of service and deaths of residents from them in Ukraine.