I think another factor in getting these high approval rates is the citizen's fear of being "found out". Like sure, they don't suspect their American friend of many years will report them to the Kremlin if they tell them they don't support Putin, but what if they find out anyways? Better to just lie and fake support than to trust a survey is truly anonymous

From speaking to Russians the overwhelming majority of people, especially in rural areas but also to a great extent in cities, probably correctly believe that elections are a waste of time because they're not going to change the status quo or I guess if someone else is elected create a power struggle, so people just vote for the incumbent as they don't want to cause trouble - the national attitude is "there's nothing you can do about it"

While that's very different from supporting Putin, it's still intending to vote for him from a pollster's point of view, so even in third party polls his "support" is going to appear higher than it is as they're not measuring that, they're measuring number of votes

The point I'm making is that he is popular in Russia. Ergo, why wouldn't he get elected? And more specifically, his election result is exactly in line with the US-backed polling company prediction.

As for how he runs the country, whether there are lies, I'm not making a point on that.

We should question the original Western narratives about a stolen election when we can see the evidence of Putin's popularity. You can read articles in western media that affirm Putin is popular in Russia.