The Kremlin works hard to indoctrinate Russia’s youth to support Putin’s war in Ukraine. But a strong percentage support an immediate ceasefire and don’t think it’s a cause worth dying for.
June 2025
President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin continues to bolster its efforts to indoctrinate Russia’s youth in service to a militarized state. These efforts are meant to ensure for years to come young Russians’ support for military service, harsh authoritarianism, and hostility toward the West. For Putin, Russia’s young men and women will “determine the future of the country,” providing “the most important guarantees” that Russia will stay on its current course. Yet Putin is wrong. In fact, most young Russians do not actively support his aggression against Ukraine or many of the assumptions and values that underpin it.
Putin has long sought to inculcate in Russia’s young people the belief that their country faces a dire Western threat. This threat, he claims, justifies both the assault on Ukraine and the tightening of political regimentation at home. Do Russians agree with this? There is evidence that many do not, and resist cognitive manipulation by state propaganda. The Kremlin’s reach into society today falls far short of what the Soviet system, with its huge bureaucracies and all-encompassing ideology, could manage. Decades of post-Soviet privatization, marketization, and globalization have put more space between state and society and let Russians assess political matters more freely if still incompletely. For example, only 18 percent of today’s youth fully trust the information on the war disseminated by government media.
When asked in May 2025 whether they back Russian forces in the war, 30 percent of young respondents replied “definitely yes.” Expressing more ambivalent support, another 32 percent said “probably yes.” Given that Russia’s youth cohorts are the most cautious of the age groups when answering survey questions, we need to know more to pin down their attitudes toward the war. In answering an early-2025 survey question that did not require them to state their own position, 47 percent of 18-to-29 year olds said that most people in their immediate social environment did not support the war. Only 35 percent thought that their social milieu endorsed the Ukraine invasion.
Other opinion polls address young Russians’ views regarding the war and its possible termination. Against the Kremlin’s current hardline stance, one recent survey finds that fully 80 percent of young Russians support an immediate ceasefire with no preconditions (55 percent of all respondents held this view). In a late 2024 poll, 50 percent of respondents aged 18 to 24 said that, had they been able to do so, they would have halted the invasion before it began. Just 31 percent said that they would have greenlit the assault (compared to 44 percent of all respondents). Also pointing to hollow support for the war, in the same poll 57 percent of young respondents said that they would disapprove if anyone close to them signed up for Putin’s “special military operation,” while only 27 percent would approve. Respondents as a whole were split much more narrowly (42 to 40 percent) on the “disapprove versus approve” question.
Providing more texture about youth attitudes on the war, an early-2025 survey found that only 29 percent of those aged 18 to 29 favored giving preference to veterans when it comes to filling mayorships. An even smaller share (26 percent) would support a veteran to lead any of Russia’s regions. These opinions are striking since Putin has stressed, going back to 2024, the importance of recruiting veterans, the “true, real elite,” into government service particularly through a program called “The Time of Heroes.”
What Unites . . . and Divides Young Russians on the War
Young Russians, like their counterparts in other countries, have a generational disinterest in matters of state; this may account at least in part for their low war support. They do not follow national or international news closely, which in the Russian context likely insulates them from official narratives backing the war. Youthful consumption of social media over state-run television reinforces this effect. Also important is the social positioning of much Russian youth in the larger middle-class, urban population that does not openly oppose the war but also does not support it to any significant extent. Pro-war propaganda spread by schools, the Russian Orthodox Church, and workplaces is likely diminished or neutralized due to familial and social filters.
These “filters” may help explain why Russia’s young people largely reject Putin’s close association of patriotism with militarization and traditional values. In a 2023 survey, not even 15 percent of Gen Z Russians (that is, those age 28 and under) agreed that war support reflected “authentic patriotism.” Instead, 69 percent defined patriotism as “doing something for the country and [its] people that changes life for the better in a meaningful way.” Despite the Kremlin’s demands for political conformity and its equation of open antiwar sentiment with treason, a majority of young Russians believe that one can openly criticize the government and still be a patriot. They also believe that a Russian could live and work abroad (including in the West) and still be considered patriotic.
Young Russians display considerable political tolerance in other ways. More than 80 percent of those aged 18 to 30 believe that patriotism is a matter of personal choice. Only 17 percent think that “everyone should be a patriot.” Similarly, a Levada Center survey in April 2025 found only 33 percent of 18-to-24 year olds and 33 percent of those aged 25 to 39 agreeing that the government should squelch public expressions of antiwar sentiment.
Together with its martial ethos, the Kremlin since 2012 has promulgated conservatism, particularly the dominant values of the Orthodox Church, as a core component of its emerging ideology. Yet Russian youth, like much of the rest of Russian society, is often reluctant to embrace the Kremlin’s “values-based legitimation strategy” with its premise that Western materialism and spiritual nihilism are existentially attacking Russian culture. Although war often generates a sense of popular identification with national cultural institutions, young Russians are mostly unwilling to mobilize in defense of Russian Orthodoxy. Only 17 percent of those 28 and younger told a 2023 survey that Orthodox values are an important force in unifying the country. When respondents were asked, just before the invasion, to frame their vision of Russia’s future, only 11 percent identified traditional and religious values as essential elements.
While a large majority of Russians identify with the Russian Orthodox Church, this relationship remains essentially cultural or “declarative.” According to a knowledgeable observer: “Despite a decade of official efforts to promote Orthodoxy as the ‘religion of anti-Westernism,’ Russia remains the least religious of all Orthodox-majority countries.” As the Kremlin’s conservative discourse increasingly clashes with prevailing societal values, many Russians — and especially young ones — see a troubling encroachment on personal freedom by the state.
Large numbers of young Russians, like many others in their society, reject as well the Kremlin’s claim that an existential threat from the West demands prolonged material and physical sacrifices from patriotic Russians. On the eve of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, during what was already a time of high tension between Russia and the West, a large-scale survey of young Russians underscored the Kremlin’s potential political vulnerabilities. Nearly nine-tenths (87 and 86 percent, respectively) of respondents said that neither higher taxes nor a wage and pension freeze could be justified even “for the sake of strengthening Russia’s power and sovereignty.” Just 17.7 percent favored strengthening Russia’s military power, while a mere 13.3 percent backed returning Russia to Soviet-style superpower status.
This strong reluctance to sacrifice for the state in the absence of a perceived justification is shared by a majority of Russians (as it was prior to the war) despite the regime drumbeat of a Russia under dire external threat. In an early 2025 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Levada Center, only 15 percent of all respondents agreed that “our government is currently in a position where we must help it, even if it requires sacrifices.”
The unwillingness of many Russians to bear the costs of war aligns with the widespread preference for domestic development over militarization. In an April 2024 survey, 47 percent of respondents aged 18 to 24 and 54 percent aged 25 to 30 thought that Russia should strive to become “one of the 10–15 [most] economically developed and politically influential countries in the world.” Only 23 and 30 percent of those respective age groups sought “to regain the rank of superpower which the former USSR possessed.” Significantly, even most backers of renewed superpower status think that it should rest on national economic strength, not Soviet-style hard power. Reflecting these sentiments, more than 70 percent of young adults favor better relations with the West, as compared to 58 percent of Russians as a whole who feel this way.
Although Russian youth want to see the war end and better Western relations ensue, they are split over peace terms that might risk the appearance of Russian retreat. For example, 41 percent of young Russians want any peace agreement to leave Russia with at least some of the Ukrainian territory that it has seized. Perhaps they say this out of a patriotic impulse and expectation of victory, or in hopes that territorial gains will help to make sense of the war’s enormous losses. Russian youth may also fear that other states would view the return of Ukrainian territory or other significant “concessions” as signs of weakness inviting continued Western sanctions and other punitive acts that would jeopardize Russia’s future and their own life prospects.
At the same time, only 13 percent of the young respondents in a February 2025 survey said that they would object to Ukraine maintaining its “military-political status,” which presumably would include the continuation of close relations with the EU and NATO. And only a minuscule share (3 percent) of all respondents would insist on Putin’s “denazification” of Ukraine. These positions run strongly against longstanding Kremlin demands for demilitarization and regime change in Ukraine that would make the country a Russian client.
The Latent Influence of Russian Youth
If most young Russians seem to approve of or at least accept Putin’s rule, their weak support for aggression against Ukraine shows the limits of his militant narrative despite the Kremlin’s enormous efforts to promote patriotic mobilization. For the many young people who do not support the war, increased repression by the state and feelings of political helplessness have forced open dissent to the sidelines. These individuals remain disillusioned with politics and have retreated further into private life, indirectly reinforcing the Kremlin’s hold on power. To change this mindset and behavior would likely require powerful catalysts, such as widespread economic distress or large-scale military mobilization.
At the same time, the political disillusionment and disengagement of much of Russia’s youth undermines Putin’s efforts to subjugate Ukraine. The stance of young Russians erodes the societal resolve and supply of manpower that significant progress on the battlefield, let alone decisive victory, requires. This stance also represents an important obstacle to any near- to midterm effort by the Kremlin to expand its aggression in the region with conventional military forces. Moscow’s interlocutors in any peace talks should bear these realities in mind.
Thomas Sherlock is professor emeritus of political science at the United States Military Academy, West Point. The following essay does not represent the views of the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. Army, or the U.S. government.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images
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