Putin's approval rating is at 70% [0]. From [1] (referring to the invasion of Crimea):
> President Putin's approval rating among the Russian public increased by nearly 10% since the crisis began, up to 71.6%, the highest in three years, according to a poll conducted by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, released on 19 March.[346] Additionally, the same poll showed that more than 90% of Russians supported unification with the Crimean Republic
So it looks to me that most Russians supported the Crimea invasion. Why would it be different now? I find it hard to believe that if Russia hadn't found such a stubborn resistance and would've been able to annex Ucrania quickly, which was what the Russian government thought would happen, in five years all the polls wouldn't show Russians supporting the invasion.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_...
Do you remember "garbage in - garbage out"?
If people fed nothing but bravado on how the glorious leader shines the path to the wonderful future, how in the world they would see him in a negative light?
The last two years showed everyone what even the professionals are happy to spew an utter nonsense, directly contradicting their profession and education, just because they want to feel that way.
And remember - population polling gives you information on how people feel about something, not why do they feel that way.
PS:
"Let us ask your opinion on these matters:
1. How do you feel about our President?
#a I'm delighted to live in this glorious days and I'm fully supported our glorious leader!
#b I'm a shithead and prefer to spend the rest of my days in gulag."
Hyperbole, sure, but how the poll is constructed, where it was performed also matters.
On the other hand, I have a limited amount of empathy and at the moment it is being consumed by people who are actually being bombed by not their own government.
Hmm, no.
I would say believing that garbage is on them. [1]
But when you have nothing other than garbage?
Don't forget what this is the country where you can be detained for holding an invisible placard [0] - so saying something out of the party line is a quick way for the unemployment at least, hence the people who could had provided some other info (primarily on TV) have big incentives not to do so.
[0] https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-protest-arrests/25324619.html
[1] which is another joke because half of those people lived or at least were born when "government never tells the truth" was the default MO even for the government itself.
Or from a different perspective: if the opinion of the citizens doesn't matter, then why is Putin shutting down independent journalism and turning up the propaganda in his own country? That only makes sense if he cares what the public thinks.
Shutting down the media limits the average person’s reason to know there is even a thing to protest against.
It’s not absolute power over the people, but it does diminish the power of the people.
Then they can all take to the streets and protest against the regime to make their PoV heard. Sure, the protesters will clash with the police/military who will use force against them, but if it's indeed the vast majority of people as you claim, against the regime, then the police/military cannot overwhelm over ~80 million people on the streets.
If the vast majority refuse to take to the streets in protest, then it means they silently or otherwise approve the government's actions. It's up to the Russian people to sort out their politics, by violent force if need be, if they're truly unhappy with the past 30 years of fake democracy and corruption among their leadership.
Same how in 1989 people and students in Romania took to the streets, en masse, to oust the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who refused to step down and had the military shoot the protestors. Spoiler alert: he still got ousted, so the excuse that "we can't protest in Russia against Putin" does not fly.
For a man who is said to have thought the people deeply loved him, he sure was paranoid. Or maybe he actually knew how much people hated him and he was just fooling himself?
But Putin is nowhere as unpopular as Ceausescu was. His approval ratings that I've seen are no different from those of Western leaders. A lot of people there seem to believe Ukraine is full of Nazis. Nobody is going to storm his palace any time soon and I don't think the sanctions will help. They'll just reinforce his "the West is out to get us" narrative. Don't forget they don't have anything reminiscent of a free press anymore.
The problem is - as long as the economy is fine they don't care.
Personal anecdote:
In April 2010 I was protesting ratification of the so called "Kharkiv Pact" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Pact) in Kyiv. I remember a moment, when I was single-handedly pushing three rows of soldiers (national guard; they didn't really try) and almost no one else joined, one of the members of our group said to another: "There won't be a revolution today. Let's wait till they start losing money, then we'll try again".