Russians are not interested in Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk - everything is decided by Obama, Putin and Merkel, they are sure
Moscow - Kyiv, November 12 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - Russians are not interested in the internal Ukrainian political agenda, they disdain Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk as dependent figures, and do not believe in the possibility of any lasting truce between Kyiv and Donbass. These are the results of the FOM survey.
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67% of Russians have a negative attitude towards Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Only 4% perceive him positively, 14% do not know him, 15% could not express their attitude towards him. 62% have a negative attitude towards Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Only 3% of citizens perceive it well. Every fifth person has not heard anything about him, 15% found it difficult to formulate an attitude towards the Ukrainian prime minister.
The top three Ukrainian parties most well-known to citizens of the Russian Federation are the “Petro Poroshenko Bloc” (11% have heard of it), Yulia Tymoshenko’s “Batkivshchyna” (10%) and the “People’s Front” of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk (9%).
Half (52%) were unable to name a single Ukrainian party. Forty-seven percent believe the October 26 Verkhovna Rada elections were an important event for Russia, while 27% believe otherwise. Meanwhile, 52% are convinced that Russian-Ukrainian relations will not change after the Verkhovna Rada elections. Two years ago, only a third of Russians believed this, according to Kommersant's survey results.
According to FOM President Alexander Oslon, television convinced Russians that the elections in Ukraine are an important event. The sociologist explains the skeptical view of citizens on the possibility of normalizing Russian-Ukrainian relations by the fact that the war does not stop in the east of Ukraine.
According to 39% of Russians, after the elections to the Rada, the Ukrainian authorities will not observe the truce with the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics and will “resume hostilities.” Another 13% are confident that Kyiv will “try to negotiate peace” with the leaders of the DPR and LPR. 18% believe that the Ukrainian authorities will do neither one nor the other. 30% found it difficult to answer.
According to political scientist Grigory Dobromelov, Russians were convinced by the federal media that elections to the Rada “will not solve any problems”: “Citizens believe that Obama, Putin and Merkel should resolve the Ukrainian crisis.” Russians, he says, now have “quite a high interest in politics,” and since there is no Russian domestic political life, it has been replaced by the Ukrainian agenda.
“Russians watch what is happening in Ukraine like a TV series. But after the New Year holidays, people will most likely focus on Russian socio-economic problems, and then the authorities will have to figure out what else to shift their attention to,” the expert believes.
Russians are not interested in Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk – they are sure that Obama, Putin, and Merkel decide everything.