Poll: 86% of Russians support Ukraine invasion; 75% say Poland should be next A Russian BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle. (Vitaly V. Kuzmin, Wikimedia Commons/Released)
Over 85 percent of Russians support expanding the Ukrainian invasion to other countries, with 75 percent asserting Russia’s next target should be Poland, a new poll shared on Twitter by the Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security under the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine shows.
Conducted by Active Group, the survey found that 86.6 percent of Russians “tolerate and support the potential assault on the territory of the European Union, including Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and others.”
The poll also revealed that 75.5 percent of Russians approve of expanding the invasion to other countries, and agree that Poland should be invaded next. Respondents said targeting Poland makes sense in the so-called “military special operation of the Russian Federation.”
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Another 75 percent of participants said they would “tolerate to a varied extent” the Russian government’s use of nuclear weapons.
Moreover, nearly half of respondents are “absolutely sure” that Russia should attack the European Union, while just 13.4 percent opposed the idea.
“The general impression of the poll is that Russians who have agreed to communicate with interviewers are aggressive not only towards Ukraine, but also towards the EU. Respondents either refuse to communicate after learning the topic of the interview, or declare their readiness to support and approve further Russian incursions into other countries,” said Active Group founder Andriy Eremenko.
In the survey, participants were given a list of several countries that they believe will be targeted by Russia. More than 75 percent selected Poland and other nations chosen included Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
Just 25.5 percent of Russians “strongly oppose” using nuclear weapons, while 40.3 percent regard nuclear attacks as “absolutely acceptable” and 34.3 percent would support the decision to use nuclear weapons “to some extent.”
Active Group’s self-described goal with the survey was to determine how aggressive Russian society is toward neighboring nations.
“To answer it, a telephone (via the Viber messenger) survey was conducted according to the formatted methodology (the sample is representative according to the subject of the federation, sex and age of the respondent). Mandatory language for the Russian environment was used in the drafting of the questions. Thus, instead of ‘invasion’ and ‘war’ in the survey the word ‘special operation’ was used, Ukrainian security forces were called ‘Nazis’ etc. Of course, instead of ‘in Ukraine’ it was said ‘on Ukraine.’”
