On 24 February, the full intensity Russian-Ukrainian war, which started in 2022, entered its third year. To mark the occasion, it might be worth putting aside the current military events and taking stock of what we can expect in the near future. It is all the more useful to broaden our scope, because the military experience of the war was recently reviewed in a great podcast on 444 by two experts from the National University of Public Service, Krisztán Jójárt and Captain Márk Takács. Of all the domestic experts working in the public eye, they have the deepest understanding and knowledge of Russian military thinking and battlefield events. It thus would be somewhat redundant to provide a similar overview in the light of their conversation.
Instead, I will attempt to first examine what we know about Russia’s and, in the second part of the analysis, Ukraine’s attitudes to the war, while the third part of the article will focus on trends in Western public opinion. The specific question I seek to answer in the three articles is whether there is any trend in the available opinion polls suggesting that either one of the belligerents or the Western countries supporting Ukraine are giving up the fight.
Some methodology
Though a cliché, it is important to keep in mind that conducting opinion polls in countries at war is not easy. This is the case regardless of whether the country is officially in a state of war, as in Ukraine, or whether the regime is trying to downplay the significance of the war and even forbids calling it such, as in Russia’s case. In wartime, the channels of publicity are necessarily restricted, and the authorities typically claim for themselves broader powers than during peacetime.
The task is even more difficult if the ruling regime is an authoritarian or even dictatorial one. When respondents are unsure that their answers will remain anonymous or whether their opinions will not be turned against them in the future, there is an inevitable moderating effect that distorts opinions in favor of the (perceived) will of the state.
This is particularly true when the poll is conducted by telephone. In both Russia and Ukraine (and elsewhere), the most commonly used method of public opinion polling is computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI). The very fact that the research is conducted by telephone raises methodological problems. Zoltán Kmetty's enlightening paper on this topic from 2012 is worth reading. In addition, there is an additional bias stemming from the state of war and the nature of political systems. If the respondent cannot be certain that nobody except for the interviewer is listening in during the conversation, they will be inevitably, and quite understandably, more cautious.
As a result of the above problems, one can assume that the margin of error in the representativeness of the data series, despite all the filtering and data cleaning solutions, is wider than in the case of similar surveys conducted during peacetime in democratic countries. For example, if your average Russian citizen Ivan Ivanovich were called on the phone and the pollster asked about his support for his government's policy towards Ukraine, he, fully aware of the characteristics of his own country, would presumably give a more cautious answer than a Swiss citizen would to the same question.
Another difficulty has to do with the refugees, particularly in Ukraine though they pose an issue for Russia, too. Since the beginning of the escalation, millions of Ukrainian citizens have left the country. According to UN data, as of 15 February 2024, almost six million Ukrainian refugees lived in Europe, while close to 476,000 left the continent. Another 1.2 million Ukrainians relocated to Russia and Belarus. Telephone surveys cannot reach refugees in a representative way. Surveys cannot be conducted in Russian-occupied territories either. Around 800,000 people have left Russia since the start of the escalation. This is proportionally much less than in the case of Ukraine, but they, too, cannot be polled in a representative way.
To be sure, this problem is less relevant for our purpose in this article. After all, it is the people still residing in the country that decide whether or not to continue the fight, not the refugees who have fled.
First, let us take a look at the attitude of the Russian population to the war.
The Russian system is such that it makes it particularly difficult to find objective polling data. Although there are dozens of large and small research companies, two of them are really worth monitoring. One is the official, state-run All-Russia Public Opinion Research Institute, VCIOM, and the other is the Levada Centre, which is still as independent as possible and bears the name of its founder, the legendary Soviet-Russian sociologist Yuri Levada, who died in 2006.
The question is, of course, what if any information can be gleaned from the data of a state-run public opinion pollster in a country at war. The answer is that these data show what the regime wants the population and the outside world to think. On this anniversary, VCIOM has published its own analysis, and it contains some surprising details. For instance, 65% of the Russian population now think that the 'special military operation' is a success or is rather a success, which is a 6% increase since last February and comes close to the 70% recorded after the invasion had been launched. Currently, 68% of the population think it was right to launch the offensive, which is a few percentage points higher than the figure of February 2022. What this possibly means is that even a state-run institute cannot claim to show more than two-thirds of the population in support of the war, which implies that a sizable one-third of Russian society is not happy about it at all.
Another interesting result from VCIOM is that 64% of the population support and accept the "all for the front, all for victory" mentality, which obviously feeds on nostalgia going back to the Second World War. The state message here is that the population embraces the gradual transition to a war economy, even though Russia is still not formally at war.
If we look beyond the messages the authorities want to convey and look at the Levada Centre's measurements, we can find other exciting trends. The first and most important is that Levada's own results confirm VCIOM in that the vast majority of the population supports the war. Though the war cannot be named as such, the data series below, from February 2022 to January 2024, show the distribution of responses to the question "Do you personally support the activities of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine?".
It is clear that the independent Levada Centre measured almost ten percent (!) higher overall support for the war than VCIOM if one combines the "fully support" and "rather support" responses. To be fair, the questions were not exactly the same, and thus the results are not directly comparable. The results are also similar in that the Levada data do not show a substantial decline in the support since the start of the invasion; fluctuations remain within the 3.4% margin of error for values around 50% almost all the time. An important methodological detail is that Levada reached these results on the basis of face-to-face interviews.
Levada also asked whether the population considers the launch of the invasion to be a mistake. Though this approach differs from the one taken by VCIOM, the results are comparable as the meanings of "yes" and "no" need to be reversed. The answers are clear, and the final result on societal support is identical.
The picture becomes more complex if we move beyond the matter of favoring or opposing the war and look into other details. First, it is worth noting the age distribution of those who support the war. VCIOM does not provide such data, though they certainly have them, so I will rely on Levada’s data in the following section.
It is clear that the older someone is, the more likely they are to support the war, whereas younger folks tend to be more against it. The closer an individual is to the enlistment age, the less enthusiastic they are about the war, which is understandable as they are in greater danger of being conscripted. At the same time, even within the 18-24 age group most affected by this issue 61% are either fully or somewhat in favour of the war.
Interestingly, the proportion of non-respondents in this age group is particularly high, at 15%, but why this is so is unknown in the absence of more data. The proportion decreases with age, reaching only 6% in the 55+ age group. This age group also has the highest proportion of those supporting the war, 81%, which is 4% above the national average. The upper age limit for military service is 55 years in Russia, so this age group is practically unaffected, and its members have no personal stakes in the war. Their support for the war is despite the fact that it is typically their sons or grandsons who are fighting the war.
Interestingly, Levada’s research also offered a concrete alternative to respondents, that of support for peace talks instead of war. The figure below shows the distribution of answers to the question "Do you think the war should continue or peace talks should be started?" Once more, the institute employed neutral expressions, using military activities instead of "war" or "special military operation."
The distribution offers a surprising conclusion. Overall, a more significant proportion of the Russian population favors peace negotiations than continuing the war if such an alternative is given. Over the past year and a half (these questions have only been included in polling since September 2022, the first wave of Russian mobilization), the proportion of those who would definitely or rather start negotiations than continue the war has always been around 50% or slightly higher. The lowest, 45%, was measured last May, when the city of Bahmut had been taken, giving the Russian public a renewed sense of determination. The highest ratio, 57%, has been measured twice so far: first in October 2022, when the shock of the so-called partial mobilization culminated, and then in November last year, when Russian society started reckoning with the terrible losses caused by the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
This shows that the Russian population is not unaware that the country is paying a hefty price for the war. The graph below features responses to the question "Do you agree that Russia is paying too big a price for the special military operation?" Levada first posed this question in January 2023. By that time, the first oil sanctions had been imposed, Russian defeats in Kharkiv and Kherson had become evident, and the subsequent mobilization had taken place.
Overall, several conclusions can be drawn from the data about Russian support for the war. The first and most important is that Russian society does not seem to be broken by hardships and losses. A vast majority still agrees that the war should continue. It is surprising and instructive that the independent Levada measured higher support for the war than the state-run VCIOM. If there was a realistic chance of peace talks, most of the population would support it, but currently there is no willingness on either side to sit down and negotiate.
The other lesson is that the Russian population is not, despite public perceptions outside Russia, a group of dumb simpletons kept in the dark who have no idea what is happening in the war but support it due to propaganda. On the contrary, the people know that the war is costing them dearly, but they support it regardless. Put differently, support for the war is an explicitly conscious, informed decision, which takes into account the difficulties involved. Measurements by both VCIOM and Levada are consistently similar in this regard. It also follows that the difficulties and losses, which are bound to increase, are unlikely to break Russian society in the near future.
András Rácz is historian and research fellow at the German Foreign Policy Association (DGAP) in Berlin. He is also lecturer at the Corvinus University of Budapest. The views expressed in this article reflect his own personal opinion. The author is not the same as the journalist András Rácz working for the daily Magyar Nemzet. The background research for this article was supported by the National Research, Innovation and Development Office (NKFIH) under research grant 129243 "Tradition and Resilience in Russia's Security and Defence Policy".
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