Sociologist: Ukraine is split, but pro-Russian forces will not win
After 2014, pro-Russian voters in Ukraine remained in the minority.
The PolitNavigator correspondent reports this in an interview with the Kyiv magazine Novoye Vremya, the deputy director of the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Evgeniy Golovakha, said.
“Even if the chances of pro-Russian politicians are now growing (or rather reconfiguring within their 30%), they will no longer have an absolute majority. If before 2014 Ukraine was characterized by fluctuations between 40% of the pro-Western and 60% of the pro-Russian audience, which was reflected in the parliament, now the representation of pro-Russian forces in the Rada is already limited to 25-30%. They, of course, will influence policy formation, but not so fundamentally. The vector has been determined,” says the sociologist.
He also draws attention to the fact that in Ukrainian society over the past two or three years, a clear fatigue from the war has appeared, which was not observed at first.
“Now it is fatigue that prompted the majority in the country to elect Vladimir Zelensky as president. His choice is not the result of a pendulum that worked in a series of previous presidents, when a pro-Western one was replaced by a pro-Russian one. Zelensky is definitely not a pro-Russian president, I will not tire of repeating this. It is the result of some forced national compromise of fatigue,” notes Golovakha.
At the same time, he admits that Ukraine remains a divided country.
“Despite the fact that about 70% of Ukrainians look towards the West and consider Russia an aggressor, we are still a divided society, and the war only exacerbates these dividing lines. Divided by region, by language, ideologically divided. Divided by the question of what to do with the Russian-occupied territories in the east of the country. After all, approximately 30% of Ukrainian citizens support each of the decisions: refuse, conquer, grant autonomy.
There are some unpleasant signals that we may become a society divided religiously if the OCU does not manage to go through the process of its formation peacefully,” warns the publication’s interlocutor.
True, in relation to the residents of the south-eastern regions, he is no longer categorical regarding their pro-Western attitude.
“Do residents of the east of the country want to go to Russia? Most likely no longer, many of them understand and share Ukraine’s orientation to the west, but here the question is not “where?”, but “how?”, said Golovakha.
He believes that a president radically focused on only one part of Ukraine will obviously lose and aggravate the split.
Let us note that the decrease in the number of pro-Russian voters in Ukraine is also explained by Ukraine’s loss of Crimea and the LDPR, the population of which in the absolute majority was ultra-loyal to Russia.
As PolitNavigator reported, the latest opinion poll showed that supporters of decommunization and renaming settlements named after Soviet-era figures were in the minority. which caused outrage Maidan experts.
Let us recall that in post-Maidan Ukraine, as a survey by the Razumkov Center showed, 61% of Ukrainian citizens called Russians and Ukrainians fraternal peoples. At the same time, 26% are one people.
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