Sociologists backed up the President

VTsIOM on Monday published the results of another study on the attitude of Russians to the special military operation in Ukraine. According to these data, the vast majority of respondents consider the interim results of the special operation to be “significant for the country”, although its specific results were not named in the survey. Sociologists also calculated the average annual approval rates for the activities of President Vladimir Putin, recording their growth by 15 percentage points in 2022. Valery Fedorov, general director of VTsIOM, told Kommersant that the publication of the new poll was not specially timed to coincide with the president’s message and the anniversary of the special operation. The press secretary of the head of state, Dmitry Peskov, had previously promised reporters that “a lot of attention” would be paid to the topic of the special operation in the message.

The results of the new poll were published by VTsIOM on its website on February 20, four days before the first anniversary of the start of the special military operation. One of the blocks of the study is devoted to the military operations in Ukraine.

His first question shows the dynamics of support for the decision to conduct a special operation: 68% of respondents positively assess it, and this is 3 percentage points higher than in February 2022. “Rather does not support” this decision every fifth Russian (20%) – against a quarter a year earlier, another 12% found it difficult to answer.

Another question concerns the “intermediate results of the special military operation” and the assessment of their significance for the country. According to VTsIOM, 80% of respondents consider the achieved results “rather significant”, only 12% of Russians hold the opposite opinion, and 8% found it difficult to answer. At the same time, in the wording of the question, specific goals were not named this time – in contrast, for example, to the survey in September 2022 on the occasion of six months from the start of the special operation. At that time, VTsIOM offered the respondents to choose the target, which, in their opinion, “is primarily pursued by Russia during the conduct of a special military operation.” The majority of respondents (39%) answered that the main goal is “to protect Russia, disarm Ukraine and prevent the deployment of NATO military bases on its territory.” The second most popular answer is “to protect the population of Donbass” (20%), in third place is “to change the political course of Ukraine, cleanse it of the Nazis” (17%). Only 7% of the respondents then considered that the main goal of the SVO was “to occupy Ukraine and annex it to Russia.” It was a closed question, that is, citizens were asked to choose one of the options proposed by sociologists.

In turn, in the December 2022 survey, VTsIOM asked respondents to assess the significance of specific events in the framework of the special operation. Among them, in particular, were the lifting of the water blockade of Crimea and the emergence of a new road to the peninsula, the entry into Russia of four new regions, as well as the fact that the Sea of ​​Azov became the inland sea of ​​the Russian Federation, which ruled out the creation of NATO naval bases on the coast. All of the listed items were considered by the Russians to be “rather significant” events, giving more than 80% of the votes for each of these options.

Another block of questions in the study published on February 20 concerns Russians’ assessment of the president’s work (for the first time, VTsIOM made this information public at a meeting of its scientific council on February 15). According to these data, Russians’ trust in Vladimir Putin in 2022 compared to 2021 increased by 13 percentage points (from 65% to 78%), and approval of his activities as president increased by 15 percentage points (from 60% up to 75%). Even more noticeable was the dynamics in response to the question of whose interests Mr. Putin is working as head of state: the proportion of those who believe that the president works “in the interests of the majority, of the entire society” increased by 20 percentage points over the year. , from 53% to 73%.

It should be noted that the VTsIOM study was published the day before the announcement of the President’s address to the Federal Assembly, which is scheduled for 12:00 Moscow time on February 21. The specific set of topics that will be announced by the head of state, the Kremlin traditionally does not disclose in advance. But in an interview with the Rossiya 1 TV channel over the weekend, Dmitry Peskov said that Vladimir Putin would certainly pay “a lot of attention” to the topic of the special operation, the participants of which would also be present at the ceremony of announcing the message.

VTsIOM General Director Valery Fedorov, when asked by Kommersant whether the published poll was timed to coincide with the message and whether the above-mentioned sociological data could be reflected in the president’s speech, replied that the poll was not made specifically for the date of the message. “The poll is not that super fresh. It is more like a hodgepodge, summing up the results of the year of the special operation. It cannot be said that it was made specifically for the date. We just collected the most interesting, in our opinion, data on the topic from various current polls, ”Mr. Fedorov explained to Kommersant. Also, according to him, he doubts that the data of this particular study will be reflected in the message: “I am sure that the president makes decisions based on these and other data from public opinion polls.”

Elena Rozhkova