KYIV, Feb 25 – Ten months after his surprise election to the presidency, Volodymyr Zelenskiy continues to enjoy strong support from voters, indicating that his efforts to end the war and reform Ukraine resonate well with the people.

An opinion poll also showed that former President Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Zelenskiy’s biggest critics, have been dropping in popularity, while pro-Russian opposition leader, Yuriy Boyko, have enjoyed some moderate support.

Zelenskiy is backed by 24.8% of Ukrainians if the election was held in February, according to a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) released on Tuesday.

Boyko, the leader of the Opposition Platform – For Life, received support from 7.3% in the same poll, while Poroshenko and Tymoshenko followed with 6.5% and 3.5%, respectively.

Ihor Smeshko, a former head of the SBU security service and now the leader of the Strength and Honor party who nearly missed winning seats in Parliament last year, enjoys support from 3.9%, and Oleh Liashko, the leader of the populist Radical Party, is lagging behind with 2.2%.

If measured among those respondents that have already decided on who to vote for, which is generally a better prediction of real election results, Zelenskiy would score 44.2% of the vote, followed by Boyko’s 13.1%, Poroshenko’s 11.6% and Tymoshenko’s 6.9%, according to the poll.

The poll showed that 24.6% of respondents are still undecided about candidates they would be supporting, while 14.2% - that they would skip the election completely, while 1.5% have refused to answer the question.

The poll was conducted on February 8-18 by personal interviewing of 2,038 respondents living in 110 settlements of all regions of Ukraine, except for Russia-occupation areas, using a four-stage stochastic sample representative of the population of Ukraine over 18 years of age.

The margin of error does not exceed 3.3% for indicators close to 50%, 2.8% for indicators close to 25%, 2.0% for indicators close to 10% and 1.4% - for indicators close to 5%. (tl/ez)