Some 70% of Ukrainians believe that govt profiting from war, getting deeper into corruption – survey
Some 70% of Ukrainians surveyed agree that the government is profiting from war and is sinking deeper into corruption; a year ago, only 43% of respondents shared this opinion.
This is evidenced by the data of a survey, conducted by the Institute of Social and Political Psychology of the National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine together with the Association of Political Psychologists of Ukraine on March 1 through March 15, 2024 and presented at Interfax-Ukraine. In addition to the regional context, these studies were differentiated based on the political commitment of the respondents: supporters of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Valeriy Zaluzhny and Petro Poroshenko.
According to a press release based on the results of the study, residents of the country's East (57.5% agree with the above statement) and Zelenskyy supporters (47.8%) are less critical of the authorities on this issue.
"The tendencies of a critical attitude towards the authorities in general and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in particular, which seemed to have been put on pause in the first months of the full-scale invasion, have been renewed in society. This trend is most clearly manifested in the issue of corruption."
Changes in public sentiment in general "are not drastic, but they may indicate a gradual emergence of society from the state of high psychological mobilization in which it had been since the beginning of the full-scale invasion," the experts said.
The survey was conducted using face-to-face interviews. A total of 2,000 respondents aged 18 years and older were surveyed in Ukrainian-controlled territory. The sample represents the adult population of Ukraine. The sampling error is 3.2%.
The survey of regional differences in public opinion is performed based on the consolidation the regions into four macro-regions: Western (Volyn, Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Rivne, Ternopil, Chernivtsi regions); Central (Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Kirovohrad, Poltava, Sumy, Khmelnytsky, Cherkasy, Chernihiv regions, and the city of Kyiv); Eastern (Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Luhansk, Kharkiv regions); Southern (Mykolaiv, Odesa, Kherson regions). The data are also differentiated by the political allegiance of respondents based on the distribution of answers to the question "If presidential elections were to be held in Ukraine due to the end of the current president’s term and the below-mentioned individuals were running, who would you vote for?". The choice of alternatives "Volodymyr Zelenskyy," "Valeriy Zaluzhny" and "Petro Poroshenko" collectively covers 53% of the sample.
The February 2022 monitoring data, with which the current survey results are compared, was obtained on the eve of the full-scale invasion.