In the final days of June, as petrol shortages rippled across at least 50 Russian regions, queues of cars coiled outside filling stations from Voronezh to Vladivostok. The fuel crisis, triggered by Ukrainian strikes on refineries, was not yet captured in the polling data that had just been gathered. Yet the scenes at the pumps gave physical form to a sentiment that had already been hardening for months: a record 60% of Russians told Gallup this spring that the economic situation in their city or region was worsening, the highest share in two decades of measurement.

That finding, collected via telephone interviews between March and May, marked the first time a majority of respondents had voiced such pessimism. The same survey recorded a parallel collapse in perceptions of living standards, with 56% reporting a decline. Viewed from Moscow, the numbers sketched a population increasingly estranged from the narratives of resilience. Trust in the armed forces slipped from 79% to 66% in a single year; faith in the honesty of elections plunged from 56% to 40%. The share of Russians who considered the media free fell to 34%, an historic low. A separate poll of businesses by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, published in Forbes, showed a quarter of enterprises reporting a worsening financial position in early summer, while the index of personal assessments among executives dropped sharply, with 35% choosing negative evaluations.

Across the continent, the European Union’s own Eurobarometer, released on 1 July, traced a different but equally unsettled emotional map. Among the 27 member states, 58% of citizens described themselves as pessimistic about the future, a six-point rise since the previous autumn. The two most cited emotions were uncertainty (44%) and hope (43%), a pairing that analysts in Brussels read as a continent suspended between anxiety and a stubborn attachment to the European project. Three-quarters of respondents saw the EU as an “oasis of stability in a world marked by conflict”, and an identical share considered their country’s membership advantageous. Yet beneath that broad endorsement, national textures emerged.

Italian respondents stood apart. While 63% expressed optimism about the EU’s future — above the bloc’s average — the level of uncertainty in Italy reached 56%, twelve points higher than the European mean. The most striking divergence, however, was the emotion that Italians placed third after uncertainty and hope: impotence, or helplessness. At 39%, it was the highest proportion recorded in any EU country. This sense of resignation coexisted with a clear-eyed set of demands. Asked about priorities for strengthening Europe’s global position, 44% of Italians chose energy independence, again the highest figure in the Union and a full nine points above the average. Inflation and the cost of living topped their list of urgent concerns, cited by 51%, while 37% said an improvement in their financial situation would most enhance their quality of life.

In the Russian data, the economic gloom was already deep before the summer’s fuel disruptions. The Gallup survey found that only 35% of Russians considered it a good time to look for a job, down from 51% a year earlier — a swing that labour-market observers in London described as unusually abrupt. Business leaders pointed to a tightening of bank risk policies, high interest rates, and a growing tax burden. The Forbes Russia report noted that the composite business sentiment index had fallen to 43.8 points, its lowest in at least a year, with the indicator for relations with banks hitting a fresh low after the share of firms reporting worsening interactions tripled in a single month.

What lingers from these parallel soundings is not a single narrative but a pair of images: the Italian citizen who, when asked to name an emotion, reaches for a word that suggests a loss of agency, and the Russian driver, waiting in a queue for fuel, whose economic pessimism had already been sealed before the pumps ran dry.