Been to Russia and live on the border of it. Basically if you have a chance of beating Putin you aren’t going to be an option to vote for. The part of the government who decides who will be the options is controlled by Putin. The approval is pretty much bullshit, I haven’t asked everyone in Russia but I have yet to meet someone who supports Putin, especially after he invaded Ukraine.
Google still works in languages other than English, like my workaround has been to just search in Estonian and I’ll usually actually get better results and like zero AI content (AI sucks at Estonian, can’t even get grammar right). So if you wanna use Google learn an obscure language.