Poland’s prime minister said his country would do “everything” to help Kyiv win the war. “Today’s actions by Zelensky once again prove that our president is right about launching a special military operation,” he said. Russian air defences have prevented a drone attack on an oil refinery in the city of Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow, the regional governor has said.
Across the country and across all ages, a majority of Ukrainians say they are not “one people” with Russians and that the two countries should not be one. But the poll also found that more Russians think it would be wrong than right to use military force “to reunite Russia and Ukraine” – two countries with a long and complicated history of being intertwined. While polling works when people are willing to tell the truth, other tools are needed in places like Russia where such openness and access cannot be assumed. Going to war is one of Russians’ greatest fears, according to the Levada Center, an independent pollster. And after Mr. Putin’s angry speech and his cryptic televised meeting with his Security Council on Monday, Russians realized that possibility was lurching closer toward becoming reality.
How Do Americans and Russians View the War in Ukraine?
Mr Putin has a long record of masterfully manipulating public sentiment. By siding with the more militant part of the pro-war camp, which has long demanded mobilisation, Mr Putin may force doubters to pick a side and thus polarise society. He calculates that the greater (though still limited) involvement of the Russian population in Ukraine may push Russians to support their boys in uniform more strongly. It will drive a wedge between families whose members fight, and those whose run for the border or curse the war. According to recent opinion polls, conducted by pollsters such as the Levada Centre which has offices in Moscow, 70-75% of respondents in Russia support the war with Ukraine.
An artillery strike that killed at least 25 people at a crowded market in Russian-occupied Donetsk shows Ukraine’s “vicious side”, the Kremlin has said. Ukraine’s defence intelligence said in December that rat-bite fever had been spreading rapidly among Russian soldiers on the Kupyansk front. The man, 49, and his daughter, 31, were caught up in an attack at 9.25am on Kramatorsk, Donetsk, governor Vadim Filashkin said. Now it has downgraded the travel warning for the regions to “all but essential travel”, while maintaining the previous warning in the rest of Ukraine. Neither Ukraine, nor Slovakia, nor any other country,” spokesman Oleh Nikolenko said in response to Robert Fico’s remarks.
Why Do So Many Russians Say They Support the War in Ukraine?
“The problem with the Putin essay is that it is so thoroughly wrong on everything that it is hard to know where to begin,” he told CNN in an email, citing an example of the use of the term “Ukraine” as far back as 1648. The poll was completed before Putin’s announcement that Russia would send what he called “peacekeepers” into the regions. But Pozner argued that Russians understand an invasion of Ukraine would be costly. And most Ukrainians reject Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion in a speech on Monday that their country has no historical basis and is essentially a creation of the Soviet Union.
Russian state media has issued continuous denials that the Kremlin was preparing for war with Ukraine. More than 13,000 people have died fighting in the Donbas region, as it is known, since 2014, when Russian loyalists seized power in the Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. https://euronewstop.co.uk/why-no-un-peacekeepers-in-ukraine.html argue that Putin’s approval ratings are actually related to Russians’ indifference and symbolic trust in political leaders. Daring and expensive military adventures will, over time, decrease the Kremlin’s popularity, history also tells us. Russia has opened up at times after moments of calamity and catastrophe. Why Russians do not protest is perhaps better explained by Russian history and not opinion polls.
Was hatred a natural and ultimately inevitable response to the atrocities Ukrainians were being subjected to? Does it change anything to know that many Russians oppose Putin’s war but are powerless to stop him, or to understand that others have been duped into supporting it through his hyper-nationalistic discourse? A few weeks after my trip, I contacted Peter Pomerantsev, who had accompanied me from Lviv to Kyiv. He had been born in Kyiv in 1977, when Ukraine was still a part of the Soviet Union, but was brought up and educated in the United Kingdom, after his parents went into exile there.
- They are still trying to track Russian public opinion on key topics, including the war in Ukraine, providing a rare window into how the Russian public views the war’s dramatic turns over the last 18 months.
- One of my friends is against our government while her grandmother supports them, and I know that’s caused a quarrel between them.
- For months, Russians of all political stripes tuned out American warnings that their country could soon invade Ukraine, dismissing them as an outlandish concoction in the West’s disinformation war with the Kremlin.
- Mr Trump, the frontrunner to be the Republican candidate in November’s presidential election, said in July that he had a “plan” that would bring peace in 24 hours.
- A stalwart of independent reporting for almost 29 years, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, suspended operations on 28 March after receiving warnings from Russia's media watchdog Roskomnadzor.
- This war is based in no small part on dehumanizing Ukrainians as a group.
But Russian pollsters have in recent years also noted that younger audiences get more information from the internet, social media and other sources that are not controlled by the state. “They are also of the opinion that, while Ukraine could not stand up to an all-out Russian invasion, Russia would lose much more from that than any military victory would win,” he said. “It speaks to the view that, should Ukraine become a NATO member, and should NATO forces be deployed on Russia’s doorstep, that would constitute an existential threat and therefore cannot be allowed,” Pozner told CNN by email.
- Overall, researchers say they have tracked just a 9% fall in support for the war last year.
- As the war in Ukraine drags on, though, these positive waves of public sentiment are getting shorter, particularly outside the major cities, and are needing to be deployed with increasing frequency across Russia.
- At the beginning of the war, some U.S. officials predicted that public support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would erode as the war went on and economic sanctions bit more deeply, potentially pressuring him to end the conflict.
- The polling group is the leading independent sociological research organization in Russia and is widely respected by many scholars, including myself.
- The hits on two symbols of Ukrainian sovereignty struck many as not coincidental.