Most Russians support the war in Ukraine new polling shows

An overwhelming majority of Russian citizens support the full-scale war against Ukraine according to new polling data released on February 6th by the independent Russian polling organization The Levada Center.  

The Levada Center found that 77% of respondents supported the war against Ukraine while 16% of people said that they did not support the war. However, this was not the only important information revealed. 

Older Russians, those above the age of 55, were more likely to support the war against Ukraine with 81% of respondents saying so. Even more interesting was that 88% of the age cohort said they trusted state media. 

88% of those above the age of 55 also thought Russia was heading in the right direction and 84% said they approved of Vladimir Putin’s actions as president. However, younger Russians did not always feel similarly. 

Support for the actions of the Russian Armed Forces among those under the age of 24 sat at 61%. So a majority of younger Russians still do seem to support their soldiers but not in the same way as older citizens. 

Younger Russians were also more likely to believe that their country was heading in the wrong direction than older Russians. 43% responded that Russia was on the wrong path and 31% said they didn’t support Putin. 

The Kyiv Independent reported that the results of those who supported the war against Ukraine were “remarkably consistent throughout the war.” Data from November 2023 showed that 75% of Russians support the conflict. 

In the most recent breakdown of the January 2024 result, The Levada Center published one chart that revealed the numbers of those who supported the conflict going all the way to the beginning of the war in February 2022. 

In February 2022, 68% of Russians supported the war against Ukraine. Six months later that number reached 76%. One year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, 77% of those surveyed supported the war. 

By August 2023, the number of those who supported the war dipped down to 70% but it quickly rebounded in the months that followed. Never once did support for the conflict fall below the majority of those surveyed.

However, the polling data from The Leveda Center did get worse. Over 50% of those who took part in the January 2024 polling said that they favored peace talks, which was a figure that was slightly down from December.

A majority (66%) of respondents also said that they believed the country was “paying too high of a price for participating in the war,” according to a translation of a question by The Kyiv Independent. But this wasn’t good. 

The majority of people who agreed that Russia was paying too high a price in January 2024 was down from the 82% who agreed in July 2023. From this figure, it's easy to see many inside Russia have shifting opinions on the cost of war. 

Only 31% of those polled responded that Russia had a moral responsibility for civilian deaths and the destruction of Ukraine while 62% of people held the opposite opinion, which was another consistent finding. 

Just 22% of people said that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was a mistake whereas 64% of respondents thought that the war wasn’t a mistake, a figure The Leveda Center noted jumped by 6 points from September 2023. 

If there was one takeaway from the polling in January 2024, it was that Russians are a lot more engaged with the invasion, and support for the actions being taken by the country’s leaders is growing as the fortunes of the conflict shift toward Russia.