Seventy percent of Ukrainians are determined to keep fighting until their country wins the war against Russia, according to a Gallup poll conducted in early September, amid counteroffensives that retook swaths of land in the country’s south and east.
Most Ukrainians want to keep fighting until Russia is driven out, poll finds
The survey, published Tuesday, was conducted by telephone last month and preceded Russia’s barrages last week and this week against Kyiv and energy facilities across Ukraine, as well as deadly drone strikes this week in the capital.
On Tuesday, another round of attacks hit power facilities in Kyiv; in Dnipro, in central Ukraine; and in Zhytomyr, which is about 85 miles west of the capital.
The governor of the Zhytomyr region, Vitaliy Bunechko, said that about 150,000 people in the regional capital and surrounding villages had lost electrical service as a result of the attack and that by early evening, authorities had restored service to about 100,000 of them.
“The repairmen are working continuously without stopping until the end of the day and promise to fully restore energy supply in populated areas,” Bunechko said in a telephone interview. He added, however, that officials might be forced to introduce “temporary emergency shutdowns.”
“We’re moving forward in stages,” he said.
Bunechko said that two people had suffered “light injuries” in the attack and that he could not comment on the extent of the damage until engineers surveyed the site.
Moscow seems to hope that depriving Ukrainians of electricity, heat, and water service will break their will to keep fighting. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other officials have insisted that infrastructure attacks will only steel the nation’s resolve to fight until Russia is defeated.
Posting on Twitter on Tuesday, Zelensky accused Russia of terrorism. “Another kind of Russian terrorist attacks: targeting energy & critical infrastructure,” he wrote. “Since Oct 10, 30% of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed, causing massive blackouts across the country. No space left for negotiations with Putin’s regime.”
It was impossible to independently verify Zelensky’s 30 percent figure, and it was not entirely clear how the president was measuring the damage. But with tens of thousands of people without power, and some municipal governments rationing service, it was clear that the airstrikes have taken a toll.
In Strasbourg, France, where the European Parliament was in session, top European Union officials said they would help Kyiv restore critical services and withstand Moscow’s effort to leave Ukraine cold and dark during the winter.
“We are in this together and we will stand by their side,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at a news conference in Strasbourg. “We will deal with whatever Putin tries, together with Ukraine — to fend that off and to make sure that they stay interconnected with us and that they have the support from our side,” she added.
Up until just two weeks ago, von der Leyen said, Ukraine had been exporting electricity to its European neighbors, generating much-needed revenue for the country, which has seen its economy collapse amid Russia’s invasion.
Kadri Simson, the European commissioner for energy, said Brussels was providing financial assistance to Ukraine and supplying critical equipment needed for repairs. “To repair their grids and thermal power plants, you also need this specific equipment,” Simson said.
Ukrainian officials greeted the Gallup poll results as a sign that the country has the appetite — and stamina — to continue the fight. “It’s a choice between either a fight or a genocide,” Ukrainian lawmaker Maryan Zablotskyy, a member of Zelensky’s party, told The Washington Post.
Support for the war effort is so high, Zablotskyy said, because Ukrainians know the alternative is the horrors inflicted by Russian troops in cities they have captured. “We have seen what Russia does in places where there is no fighting. Any sort of resistance is better than the fate of the people who have been conquered by Russia,” he said. “This is existential.”
Support for Ukraine’s military registered at nearly universally high levels, with 94 percent reporting they had confidence in their armed forces. Despite fears of worsening economic conditions and degraded quality of life, the data showed public confidence in the national government, led by Zelensky, to be at the highest level recorded in 17 years of Gallup polls.
Rather than exacerbating long-standing divisions among Ukrainians concerning Russia and the West, the poll found, President Vladimir Putin’s invasion has given the country a common sense of purpose and boosted hopes of closer ties with the E.U. and NATO.
A majority of Ukrainians think that within 10 years their country will be a member of the E.U. (73 percent) and NATO (64 percent), according to Gallup, reflective of a broader optimism among the country’s population about Ukraine’s future.
Even so, the study reveals potential cracks in popular support for Ukraine’s fight to victory. One of the biggest divisions ran along gender lines, with 76 percent of Ukrainian men in favor of continuing the war effort compared with 64 percent of women.
The most pronounced differences were regional — with support for fighting until victory strongest in Kyiv (83 percent) and western Ukraine (82 percent) and significantly lower in the east (56 percent) and in the south (58 percent), closer to the front lines and the grinding ground battle.
Zablotskyy acknowledged that support for the war may differ among the regions, but he also noted the higher proportion of Russians living in some parts of the country. “Nineteen percent of Ukrainian citizens consider themselves Russian,” he said, referring to recent demographic polling, and they primarily reside closer to the Russian border in the country’s east. He suggested that those Ukrainians may be more susceptible to pro-Russian messaging.
Across the country as a whole, 26 percent of Ukrainians say the government should negotiate an end to the fighting as quickly as possible.
It is difficult to compare popular support for the war effort with equivalent levels in Russia, where freedom of speech is heavily restricted and reliable surveying is difficult. But some polling appears to show that Russians are less likely to support fighting to victory.
Beatriz Ríos in Strasbourg and David L. Stern in Mukachevo, Ukraine, contributed to this report.
Source: WP
