Vladimir Putin’s Russia Day was not the celebration he had planned. The annual holiday, marking the birthday of modern Russia on 12 June, saw mass events cancelled and major airports impose restrictions after an overnight onslaught on key infrastructure. The Tolyattikauchuck petrochemical plant was hit, along with the Taneko oil refinery in Nizhekamsk, Tatarstan.
Ukraine also claimed to have destroyed a £20m Russian Tor surface-to-air missile system in the Kursk region and ‘completely paralysed’ a key logistical route by striking the Armiansk bridge, which connects occupied Crimea with mainland Russia. Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems forces, said Crimea will be ‘isolated’ in the near future.
“Drone attacks on Russia Day and a bleak economic poll deepen pressure on Putin as Ukraine strikes key targets.”
The military setbacks come as new polling reveals growing discontent over Putin’s economic policies. One third of Russians have a negative view of how his policies are impacting the economy, compared to 15 per cent who believe they are having a positive effect, according to a survey by the NEST Centre. More than one third of respondents believe the economy has deteriorated in the past three months, while one in five have a negative overall assessment of the state of the economy.
“Poorer citizens with fixed incomes, voters aged 45-65, and those who get their news from social media are forming the bulk of the discontent,” said Sergey Aleksashenko, head of economics at NEST Centre and Russia’s deputy finance minister from 1993 to 1995. He added that official figures show satisfaction with Russia’s economic policy has turned negative for the first time since 2022, on a level with the Covid-19 pandemic and the controversial 2018 pension reforms.
Moscow has dramatically scaled up its defence spending to 40 per cent of the federal budget, with military spending reaching historic post-Cold War highs. “So far, Putin has been successful in shielding the public from the impacts of the Ukraine War, but sustained economic decline will make this harder,” Aleksashenko said.
Meanwhile, satellite images show Russia is building a new military base near the Finnish border for the first time since the Soviet era, with a dozen barracks 100 miles from the Nato member’s frontier. As Ukraine intensifies its strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, the pressure on Putin’s war economy only grows.