Brave Woman: Russian Blogger’s Criticism of Kremlin Goes Viral
- 37 minutes ago
- 2 min read
The Kremlin is grappling with the fallout from the viral spread of a celebrity blogger’s criticism of Russian authorities. Could it kick start a mood shift against the war?
Whilst OGN generally prefers to stay away from wars and politics, this story may be heralding a shift in the brainwashed mindset of ordinary Russians, and that could ultimately be good news for Ukraine.
It's thanks to Victoria Bonya, a household name in Russia. She rose to fame in 2006 on Dom-2, the country’s answer to the reality TV show Big Brother, and posted a video last week warning Vladimir Putin that a string of mounting problems risked spiralling out of control. “The people are afraid of you, artists are afraid, governors are afraid,” she said, in the 18-minute video on Instagram, which has attracted over 26m views and more than 1.3m likes.
She talked about a range of issues that she said no regional governor would dare raise with Putin directly: flooding in Dagestan, oil pollution along the Black Sea coast, livestock culls in Siberia, internet blackouts and a squeeze on small businesses from rising prices and taxes. “You know what the risk is?” asked Bonya, who lives outside Russia. “That people will stop being afraid, and they’re being squeezed into a coiled spring, and that one day that coiled spring will shoot out.”
Remarkably, the Kremlin took the unusual step of publicly acknowledging the sharp criticism, saying work was under way to address problems identified by Bonya.
“War fatigue is really starting to set in,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political scientist and author of a recent book on Putin’s ideology. “It is beginning to click in people’s minds that everything that is happening is a consequence of the war.”
Abbas Galyamov, an exiled former Putin adviser, said public appeals from Russian celebrities such as Bonya could lead to further discontent among society. “Bonya is bringing a fundamentally new audience into the opposition camp that wasn’t there before,” he said.
