By Konstantin Kisin writing on his Substack
Putin has a genuinely high approval rating amongst the Russian populace, most outside observers have trouble understanding this.
From the article,
The first thing you should know is that support for Putin is directly correlated with the amount of time you spent living under the Soviet Union. Why does this matter? Because the collapse of the USSR, which Vladimir Putin described as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, is crucial to understanding the mindset of everyone who lived through it. Very few people in the West have any conception of just how traumatic the 1990s were for ordinary Russians.