Young Urban Russians May Support Putin but Don’t Buy His Narratives on West or China, New Study Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 28 – The younger generation of urban Russians may support Putin but they don’t accept his condemnation of the West or his calls for emulating China, according to such people who took part in focus groups earlier this year organized by the European Center for Analysis and Strategies.

            CASE conducted focus groups consisting of 64 Russians aged 18 to 30 in eight large Russian cities and has now published the results (case-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Russian_Youth_2026_Report_RU.pdf, discussed at vot-tak.tv/93517034/nekrasov-molodiorz-ne-verit-propagande).

            Dmitry Nekrasov, the CASE director who oversaw this research, says that in the minds of young urban Russians, “the West is associated not with the image of the enemy, as Russian propaganda portrays,” that those who have emigrated are viewed not as traitors but neutrally or even positively, and that Western life is normal and desirable.

            Moreover, Nekrasov continues, the study found that Putin’s “’turn to the east’ doesn’t resonate among them either. “They don’t want to live in China. Yes, China is our friend. Let’s be friends at the state level but no, it is better to live in the West. This is their unequivocal choice.

            Russian propaganda and especially taking part in propaganda exercises, Nekrasov says, is viewed by the young as “a tedious obligation,” something “ritualistic and without any deeply held meaning.” It may provide “some kind of tortured external loyalty,” he continues; but it isn’t what they really believe.

            And he concludes that this is very much like the situation in the last decades of Soviet power: “Even Komsomol members” who declared how much they supported the Communist Party and opposed the West nonetheless almost invariably “wanted jeans and chewing gum.”