KYIV, April 1 – More than 63% of Ukrainians surveyed believe that "everyone who has stained themselves by collaborating with the enemy in temporarily occupied territories should be imprisoned without exception," and only 12% disagree with this.

This is evidenced by the data of a survey presented at Interfax-Ukraine, conducted by the Institute of Social and Political Psychology of the National Academy of Pedagogic Science of Ukraine together with the Association of Political Psychologists of Ukraine on March 1-15, 2024.

"More than 63% of respondents now agree that everyone who has stained themselves by collaborating with the enemy in temporarily occupied territories should be imprisoned without exception, and only 12% disagree with this. The most irreconcilable on this issue are residents of the western regions (70% agree, and 7.6% - no.) Respondents from the south are less categorical: 53.5% and 24.4%, respectively," says the press release on the results of the study.

Meanwhile, as sociologists note, "on fundamental issues of the national agenda and resistance to Russian aggression, Ukrainian society remains highly consolidated - two-thirds of citizens (65.2%) reject the idea that Ukraine is too different and we cannot get along in one state (in 2023 - 61.5%, in 2022 - 67.6%)."

At the same time, sociologists state that respondents express a negative attitude towards their fellow citizens who, after the start of the full-scale invasion, went abroad. A source of social tension is also the problem of both obvious collaboration and hidden loyalty of a certain part of Ukrainian citizens to the Russian side.

If a year ago 35.6% of respondents agreed that Ukrainian refugees often disgrace Ukraine before Europe with their behavior, and 30.2% disagreed, now opinions are distributed fundamentally differently: 46.2% agree with this statement and only 20.6% - no. Residents of the south and east of Ukraine are most negatively disposed towards refugees.

A quarter of respondents agree that many residents of Ukraine see Russian troops as their liberators (a year ago, less than 15% of respondents thought so). About 43% now disagree with this statement, which is significantly less than in 2023 (58.7%).

The survey was conducted using face-to-face interviews. Some 2,000 respondents aged 18 years and older were surveyed in Ukrainian-controlled territory. The sample represents the adult population of Ukraine. The sampling error is 3.2%.

The analysis of regional differences in public opinion is carried out on the basis of uniting the regions into four macro-regions: Western (Volyn, Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Rivne, Ternopil, Chernivtsi regions); Central (Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Kirovohrad, Poltava, Sumy, Khmelnytsky, Cherkasy, Chernihiv regions, Kyiv); Eastern (Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Luhansk, Kharkiv regions); and Southern (Mykolaiv, Odesa, and Kherson regions).

The February 2022 monitoring data, with which the current survey results are compared, were obtained on the eve of a full-scale invasion. (om/ez)