“Vladimir Vladimirovich, people are afraid of you,” were the opening words of Russian beauty influencer Victoria Bonya, known for her makeup tips and lifestyle content, in an Instagram post addressed to President Vladimir Putin.
“The public is afraid of you, the bloggers are afraid of you, the artists are afraid of you, the governor is afraid of you, and you are the president of our country,” she continued.
Bonya appealed directly to President Vladimir Putin (who he says supports him) and listed various diseases in Russia. These include an alleged slow response to floods in Dagestan, as well as a poor response by the government to recent livestock culling in Siberia and increased restrictions on online social networks. She claimed in a post on Tuesday that this last thing is preventing people from communicating with their loved ones. “I feel like we no longer live in a free country,” she says.
Bonya, who now lives in Monaco and has her own cosmetics line, had 26 million views and more than 75,000 comments on her Instagram video by Friday afternoon, with many praising her bravery.
A popular Russian lifestyle and beauty influencer living abroad under the alias Isa also supported Bonya on her Instagram account, claiming that the latest restrictions on the Telegram messaging platform will be a “huge blow to the Russian economy,” adding to other complaints such as high taxes and inequality. “How much is enough to steal?” she asked, referring to “the average member of Congress who owns billions and millions of dollars worth of property and holds multiple (foreign) passports.” She later deleted the video.
The public backlash against the Kremlin comes as several recent opinion polls show support for President Putin is waning. President Vladimir Putin is introducing an internet crackdown as he continues years of pressure on Ukraine amid growing economic hardship for most Russians in the country, including his supporters.
“Something seems to be changing,” said Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of political analysis firm R.Politic. Even in a society accustomed to wartime restrictions and economic hardship, the mobile internet outages and Telegram crackdown in recent weeks were “akin to a watershed moment,” she told CNN.
Internet regulations in Russia have been tightened since early spring, pushing the country’s already tightly controlled information space into uncharted territory. The planned mobile internet outage that upended daily life in Russia’s largest cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, coincided with a new crackdown on Telegram throttling and VPNs, which are widely used in Russia to circumvent existing restrictions on internet access.
Government officials say the mobile internet blackout is part of a security effort to counter “increasingly sophisticated methods” of attacks on Ukraine, and the Kremlin has promised that “internet services will be restored to full normalcy as soon as it is determined that this measure is no longer necessary.”
“I can’t stand what they’re doing to us.”
Telegram’s restrictions have been particularly damaging to online influencers, who had already lost the income they might have earned on Instagram after a law went into effect in September that prohibits Russian residents from advertising on websites that Russia blocks or deems “undesirable.” Although Instagram was officially blocked in 2022, it is still widely accessed via VPN.
On March 26, Russian lifestyle and parenting writer and blogger Liza Moka posted a tearful video message to her 900,000 Instagram followers. “This cannot continue,” she said. “I can’t stand what they are doing to us, these tyrants who are disconnected from reality.” She lives in a remote rural area and said the only way she can work and her children receive an education is online.
“It’s nonsense to say to my kids, who I’ve raised to be patriotic, ‘Kids, in order to be able to go to school, you have to turn on a special VPN to get around what the people who are supposed to be taking care of you have come up with,'” she says. That video received 2 million views.
“I hope I don’t end up in jail because of this video,” 19-year-old Instagram user Artyom said in early March. In a video that has been viewed more than 600,000 times, he said he was “shocked” by the fact that Russia not only blocked the social network, but also banned the use of English words in advertising. “Where is freedom? I don’t understand how people still claim to be free. Opportunities are becoming less and less,” he said.
And it’s not just people on social media who are speaking out. Several recent newspaper columns have decried internet shutdowns being imposed on people without adequate explanation. An article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta in late March openly compared the closure to Stalin’s ban on some research in genetics and robotics.
Ekaterina Shulman, a Russian political scientist at the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Center in Berlin, suggests that internet regulation has stirred more public opinion because it is seen as a somewhat apolitical topic, but she says the subtle shift in public mood started even earlier, and was caused in particular by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“There were quite a few indicators of this change in attitudes in 2025,” she told CNN. “We have seen a steady and growing majority of the population who would rather see the war stopped than continue, even if the stated goals were not achieved.” Many Russians also hoped that “our allies in the White House would manage the situation, and the war would end victoriously on our terms. Nothing like that happened.”
And this is affecting people who have never questioned their leaders before, said Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov. “War fatigue is evident even among patriots,” he said in written comments to CNN. “The hopes they had for Trump are gone.”
Shulman said it was difficult to understand the influence of public opinion in Russia, saying, “In authoritarian regimes, there is no direct and immediate connection between the fact that people are dissatisfied with something or want something and… the actions taken by the authorities.”
“The Russian people are not voters,” she told CNN, adding that the outcome of parliamentary elections scheduled for this fall was “predetermined” by those already in power.
Therefore, the Kremlin’s reaction to this is noteworthy. On Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov took the unusual step of commenting directly on Bonya’s video, saying that “many topics are touched upon and work is being carried out individually… none of them are being ignored.”
At its daily press conference on Friday, the Russian government denied claims that President Putin is being kept in the dark about the true scale of the country’s problems, as some bloggers suggested in a video. “President Putin is the head of state. His powers cover the widest range of issues on the agenda,” Peskov told CNN, avoiding a direct question about whether he thought Russians were afraid of the president.
Bonya thanked Peskov in a video on Thursday, with tears streaming down her face, and sought to distance herself from earlier coverage of her message by non-Kremlin-approved broadcasters the BBC and Russian opposition channel TV Rain.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I just want to say it was worth it,” she continued.
Pressure on Russian bloggers is increasing.
In mid-March, pro-Putin blogger Ilya Remeslo posted a manifesto on his Telegram page calling for the Ukraine war to be a “dead end” and for Putin to be brought to justice. The next day, it was reported that he was taken to a psychiatric hospital in St. Petersburg.
In her original video, Bonya also raised concerns over the case of Valeria Chekalina, a popular blogger known online as Lelchek, whose ex-husband, Artyom Chekalin, was sentenced to seven years in prison on Monday for illegally transferring money. Cecalina herself was placed under house arrest on similar charges, only briefly suspended so she could participate in treatment for her stage 4 cancer.
Experts say further repressive measures could be taken, especially since Putin’s approval rating has fallen by more than seven points so far this year, according to Russian state pollster VCIOM. “We will probably soon see a wave of new restrictions, crackdowns, institutional changes and personnel changes,” Stanovaya said.
Schulman argued that the question for the regime’s overall stability now is whether Russians will interpret the current situation of internet repression, escalating economic hardship, and endless war as the status quo or as a temporary and abnormal situation.
“The president is maintaining the status quo,” she told CNN. “If you like it, you approve of him. When you start to dislike the status quo, you start to dislike him.”
