State-run VTsIOM said 78.9 per cent of respondents in its latest survey said they approved of Putin’s actions, compared to 64.3 per cent in the last poll before the start of the war
File image of Russian president Vladimir Putin. AP
A recent survey by Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM) has found that there has been a significant rise in trust among the country’s citizens in their president since the invasion of Ukraine. Published on Friday, VTsIOM states that Vladimir Putin’s approval rating has soared to 81.6 per cent from 67.2 per cent since the war began on 24 February, according to Reuters.
VTsIOM said 78.9 per cent of respondents in its latest survey said they approved of Putin’s actions, compared to 64.3 per cent in the last poll before the start of the war. The proportion who disapproved of his actions fell to 12.9 per cent from 24.4 per cent.
This is in tune with another poll conducted in March by the independent Moscow-based Levada Center, which stated that the Russian president has his highest approval rating among Russians since September 2017.
The poll, conducted from 24-30 March among 1,632 Russian adults, found 83 per cent of Russians support Putin’s activities as president, up by 12 per cent from Levada’s February survey conducted in the days leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February.
But Levada had also recorded a comparable surge in Putin’s approval rating in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and annexed it and Russian-speaking separatists took control of part of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine with Moscow’s support.
VTsIOM said it surveys 1,600 people across Russia each day and its weekly polls are an average of responses from the previous seven days, according to Reuters. The poll published on Friday was gathered between 28 March and 4 April, it said.
According to the director of the Levada Center Lev Gudkov the idea that Russians are afraid to tell the truth about politics is a concept primarily spread by dissidents, reports Fox News.
Gudkov insists that everyone else in Russia is under the “spell of the state TV propaganda that has been relentlessly pumped into their brains over the last several years, parroting Kremlin lines.”
“Anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian sentiment was stirred, and we hadn’t seen such fear about the real possibility of war before. Seventy-three percent of people were scared about a world war,” he told Fox News.
Gudkov said that due to Russia’s censorship and the extreme lack of independent news outlets, the high ratings — what many would call shockingly high — for the Ukraine invasion reflected the power of Kremlin propaganda.
Despite Putin’s surging domestic popularity, many internationally have condemned him for ordering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has displaced more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes, killed or injured thousands and turned cities into rubble.
With input from agencies
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