Valery Fedorov, the head of the state-owned VTsIOM polling agency, said in a television interview on Thursday that 15 percent of Russians make up the unpatriotic “shit” who regularly criticize Vladimir Putin.

“These are the people who have no love for our Russia. These are the people who have no desire to make it better. These are the people who are always ready to criticize and protest, whether they have a reason or not,” Fedorov said, arguing that young people make up just a fifth of the recent anti-corruption protests. He blamed the media for exaggerating the presence of youths in this movement.

Earlier in June, pro-Kremlin pundit Vladimir Solovyov said during a live radio broadcast that the anti-corruption demonstrators who attended an unsanctioned protest in central Moscow on June 12 were “two-percent shits,” presumably referring to the “Two Percent” Theory proposed by political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, who has argued for the past decade that it would take only a minority of the Russian population — just 2 percent of the people — to form a “counter-elite” and effect major political reforms.