The War Putin Wanted to Keep Away Is Coming Home to Russia

Olga was jolted awake by an explosion so powerful that her apartment building shuddered and the windows and furniture shook. Looking outside, she saw a plume of thick black smoke rising from a military equipment factory that had just been hit by a missile.

Residents panicked, said Olga, a 49-year-old choreographer. “We didn’t know whether we should run to a shelter,” she said. The strike on the plant left six people dead and another 26 injured, according to the local governor. 

Olga doesn’t live in Kyiv, Kherson or any other Ukrainian city that’s been pounded for years by President Vladimir Putin’s forces. This is Kirov, a Russian city about 800 kilometers northeast of Moscow known for its 16th century onion-domed monastery rather than being in a war zone.

The missile strike was one of the many that have inflicted rising civilian casualties inside Russia in recent months. They are bringing Putin’s war home to his own people after he promised a swift and glorious victory.

Since Ukrainian strikes intensified in mid-summer, people inside Russia are killed almost every week, according to a Bloomberg analysis of statements from regional authorities on their Telegram channels.

Meanwhile, as Russia prepared to resume trilateral negotiations with the US and Ukraine on a potential peace deal in Abu Dhabi this week, confidential data hacked from Russia’s statistics service showed about 400,000 of its people have been killed fighting in Ukraine. It’s a scale of military deaths the country hasn’t seen since World War II.

The Kremlin tightly controls the narrative around the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now nine months into its fifth year. While the death toll touches a huge number of families in Russia, it won’t necessarily have political consequences for Putin, who taps into historical memory to justify the sacrifice in what he claims is an existential fight with the West in Ukraine.

Kremlin propaganda routinely seeks to draw parallels between Russia’s actions in Ukraine and the fight against Nazi Germany in World War II, which cost an estimated 27 million Soviet lives to defeat, while simultaneously glossing over the Ukrainian contribution to that victory.

In many ways, Russian society absorbs the losses from the current war on that scale of reference and there are increasing signs Russians are now getting used to civilian fatalities with the same passivity. 

Olga declined to give her last name, fearing repercussions for speaking openly about the conflict. She lives near Kirov’s Avitek plant, which produces surface-to-air missiles, ejector seats and other aviation equipment and was targeted by Ukraine in July. But daily life in a growing number of Russian cities, including Moscow, can no longer be described as peaceful.

Air-raid sirens signaling the threat of missile or drone strikes have become a daily occurrence for millions of residents in most of the regions of central Russia. In some cities, they can’t simply be switched off because they are broadcast through street loudspeakers and building intercom systems.

In the Moscow region, the sounds of war come each day, said Ksenia, 71, a pensioner from the city of Kolomna, about 120 kilometers southeast of the capital. “Every night we hear air defenses, the windows shake, car alarms go off and dogs bark in fear,” she said. “I recently saw a drone being shot down over the stadium. I was watching a movie at night and saw this ball of fire through the window.”

Ukrainian drones and missiles can also now strike up to 3,000 kilometers from the border, putting nearly half of Russia, the world’s largest country, within range.

At least 487 civilians were killed in Ukrainian attacks on internationally recognized Russian territory, or roughly double the number for all of 2025, based on estimates by Bloomberg Economics from publicly disclosed data.

“The war is penetrating ever deeper into Russian territory and becoming increasingly lethal for its civilian population,” said Alex Kokcharov, an analyst at Bloomberg Economics in London.

Civilian deaths in Russia remain a fraction of those suffered by Ukraine, where at least 328 people were killed in attacks in September alone. On Nov. 2, a Russian strike hit a former school being used for humanitarian aid in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, killing more than 50 people, with dozens still missing.

Life in Russia also still remains relatively normal compared with in Ukraine, where residents have to endure long power outages and disruption to heating and water supplies. Moscow’s restaurants, theaters and exhibitions are full of people. Even in Voronezh, a city of about 1 million and the capital of a region bordering Luhansk in Ukraine, life continues largely uninterrupted despite daily drone and missile alerts.

The Kremlin has been trying to contain the domestic political impact of Ukrainian strikes. State media reports on the aftermath of major strikes tend to be brief and the footage on television is scarce.

Regional governors routinely call the attacks “terrorist acts” on Telegram, reinforcing the Kremlin’s portrayal of the Ukrainian “regime” as a threat to ordinary Russians.

Centuries of arbitrary official power has left most Russians with a distrust of the authorities, while they don’t regard Russia’s leader as accountable to them for his actions. The Kremlin cracked down hard on even mild public dissent since the war began, while jailing activists as “extremists,” leaving any opposition mostly isolated at home or in impotent exile abroad.

The authorities have banned taking photos and videos of the strikes and posting them on social media networks, though that’s often ignored. Comments about the war in public spaces can also be scrutinized and potentially lead to legal consequences. Communication has been tougher because of disruption to mobile data networks and the internet, with many Russians having to use VPNs to access social media.

Despite his tarnished image at home, Putin remains popular with many Russians as the leader who restored stability after the turmoil of the 1990s, ended the war in Chechnya and presided over years of relative prosperity. The growing sense of war inside Russia’s borders and mounting economic pain are unlikely to lead to protests and pressure on him to end the fighting.

The conflict has only begun to weigh seriously on household incomes in the past year, while the Kremlin shielded major cities from its direct effects and avoided a new wave of mobilization, said Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In Russia, there’s also a weaker understanding of the link between the actions of the government and the economic fallout on ordinary people, she said. “Russian society is not a Western-style society,” she said. “Discontent will probably build very slowly, and it will take even longer to turn into any form of resistance.”

Putin’s approval ratings fell during the summer, though are recovering because the public views the escalation of the war through the lens that “the West forced Russia to fight,” according to Denis Volkov, director of the independent Levada Center in Moscow.

Indeed, anger was greater over a gasoline crisis, he said, when drivers in one of the world’s biggest oil-producing countries were forced to spend hours waiting to fill their tanks.

Moscow and St. Petersburg have faced several large-scale attacks this year that caused deaths and produced dramatic images of fires in the heart of Russia’s two biggest cities. And strikes are increasingly affecting even Russian regions previously considered safe from combat operations like Yekaterinburg in Siberia or Perm in the Urals.

Disruptions at major airports have become routine in recent months, with hundreds of flights canceled or delayed every week because of drone attacks. On Oct. 23, passengers at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo, Russia’s busiest airport, were evacuated to shelters during an air raid. 

Some Russians describe a sense of powerlessness as Ukraine strikes back against Putin.

“You have been given a long sentence and there is nothing you can do — maybe you’ll get out early, maybe you won’t,” said Olga, a 60-year-old employee of a large state bank in Moscow. “But you have to behave and follow the rules of the prison governor.”

As Russia continues to hit Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure on a daily basis, Kyiv is also targeting a wider range of assets inside Russia.

Beyond oil refineries, Ukraine hit dozens of warehouses operated by Wildberries and Ozon, Russia’s largest online retailers. Residential buildings are also being damaged more frequently than before.

Last month, Ukraine for the first time struck three data centers operated by Yandex, Russia’s largest technology company. The strikes temporarily disrupted cloud services, payments, deliveries, taxi apps, navigation and other online services, demonstrating how easily Ukraine can disrupt Russia’s highly digitalized everyday life.

In January, Russian air defenses were intercepting about 120 Ukrainian drones and missiles a day. That had risen more than fivefold by September, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov told Putin on Oct. 16.

The war also comes with significant economic consequences for the population. Households have been hit by higher bills for utilities and face rising taxes as the government looks for additional ways to sustain growing military spending.

Strikes on refineries contributed to the acute gasoline shortage, while attacks on warehouses have forced retailers to rethink their logistics networks, raising operating costs and adding to price pressures.

For Ksenia in Kolomna, it’s a case of just coping. She is among the phalanx of Russians, particularly those with more traditional views and stronger Soviet-era memories, who appear more inclined to adapt.

“We preserved more food, we even store water in the basement and bought a gas cylinder and we have flashlights and stocked up on candles, just in case,” she said. “We have the war.”

©2026 Bloomberg L.P.

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