I have two brief stories for you all at the intersection of polling and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The first is on the probable lack of domestic public support for Vladimir Putin’s war:
Consider anti-war protests. Since Putin’s announcement of military action on Wednesday, news reports of massive protests and arrests around Russia have indicated the public may not be backing their leader. Police have arrests 2,000 people in Moscow, for example — in all likelihood a fraction of the actual number of people protesting.
Then, account for the lack of free and fair elections in Russia. The last elections to the national legislature (the Duma) were noticeably fraudulent. That fits with a long pattern of state agents stuffing ballot boxes or fabricating results outright for decades. The “votes” received by Putin and his United Russia party are very likely in excess of their actual number of supporters among the population. (It is also worth noting that Russia uses a first-past-the-post voting system for electing members to its Duma, so United Russia controls 72% of seats in the Duma despite winning only 50% of votes nationwide.)
Finally check out the polls. One survey conducted from February 7th to 15th by Savanta ComRes found that only 36% of Russians said it would be justified to use military force to “reunite Russia & Ukraine,” whereas 43% of people were against it. 50% (v 25%) said it would be justified to use force to stop Ukraine joining NATO. The same poll found that 65% of Russians expected a peaceful end to the crises. It is appropriate to speculate they could quickly lose any appetite for real war in Ukraine. (And here, I should acknowledge that polling in authoritarian countries is very hard. It’s possible respondents could have inflated support for Putin for fear of retribution from state agents.)
It is important to consider that Vladimir Putin’s actions may not represent the will of the Russian people. The extremely lopsided control of the Duma and public opinion polls both indicate support for invasion may fade away quite quickly.
Second, here is a story from experts at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security think-tank, about what Putin thought he knew about Ukrainian public opinion before invading:
RUSI’s Nick Reynolds and Dr Jack Watling report that the FSB, Russia’s intelligence agency and the successor to the Soviet KGB, had been gathering polls of Ukranians showing low trust in the government.
RUSI’s canvas of FSB documents suggests that Putin partly based his decision to invade on this poll. But it is unclear if the data were correctly representative of Ukrainian public opinion. It is obviously possible that the presence of pro-Putin Russian interviewers would have caused responses from the Ukrainians to become biased. But the FSB also did not conduct interviews in the western part of Ukraine, which is more supportive of Kyiv, NATO and the West more broadly.
And while Putin focused on the apparent levels of low trust in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the FSB surveys still revealed high levels of trust in the Ukrainian armed forces. The Army, for example, is buttressed by large numbers of civilian volunteers from around the country — tying the government’s military power to local villages and indicating high in faith and participation with any state defense against Russia.
RUSI writes “If Russia hoped that shock and awe in the destruction of the Ukrainian military might deter resistance… [the survey] told the Russians little about how sentiments would evolve in the aftermath of an invasion.”
Clearly, relying on this poll was a huge mistake for the FSB, and for Putin. This story is a great example of how governments use survey for a diverse range of decisions — even those with the ultimate stakes. It serves as a reminder of why it’s important to make sure the data you gather are gathered and processed correctly, and presented with the right caveats.
I wonder whether Putin and gang care a rat's hair about the will of the Russian people.