Over 70% of Ukrainians do not support elections during ceasefire
A recent survey has indicated that 71% of Ukrainians do not support holding elections during a ceasefire with Russia, even with security guarantees for Ukraine, while 25% of the respondents take the opposite view.
Source: the survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) on 2-12 May
Quote: "Thus, the vast majority of Ukrainians – 71% – do not support holding elections after a ceasefire, even with security guarantees, and believe that elections should only be held after a final peace agreement and a complete end to the war. They believe that elections should be held after the ceasefire or even now – 25%."
Details: The survey also showed a slight increase in support for holding elections either after a ceasefire or right now, rising from 19% in March 2025 to 25% now.
Nonetheless, the proportion of those who believe elections should be held only after the war has fully ended dropped from 78% to 71%.
Read more: Let's wait until after Easter. When will the elections be held in Ukraine?
For reference: The Omnibus public opinion poll was conducted on 2-12 May. Telephone interviews were used based on a random sample of mobile phone numbers in all government-controlled regions, and 1,010 respondents aged 18 and older were surveyed.
Formally, under normal circumstances, the statistical error of such a sample (with a probability of 0.95 and taking into account the design effect of 1.3) did not exceed 4.1% for indicators close to 50%, 3.5% for indicators close to 25%, 2.5% for indicators close to 10%, and 1.8% for indicators close to 5%.
In wartime conditions, a certain systematic deviation is added to the specified formal error.
Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Russia launches one of war's largest air attacks days after Ukraine's bomber raid
Russia launched a barrage of drones and ballistic missiles across broad swaths of Ukraine early Friday, killing at least six people and injuring dozens of others, days after Kyiv launched a daring raid on Moscow's fleet of strategic bombers. For residents of Kyiv, the night's soundtrack was familiar: the shrieking whir of drones, air raid sirens and large explosions overhead – whether from air defenses successfully downing missiles, or projectiles puncturing the capital. Three firefighters were killed in Kyiv, two civilians were killed in Lutsk, and another person was killed in Chernihiv, according to the Ukrainian State Emergency Service. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had used more than 400 drones and 40 missiles in the overnight attack, putting it among the war's largest. He said Moscow's attack injured 80 and targeted 'almost all' of Ukraine, listing nine regions, from Lviv in the west to Sumy in the northeast. Although Russia has pummeled Ukraine almost daily over three years of full-scale war, Ukrainians had been bracing for retaliation since Sunday, when Kyiv launched an audacious operation that struck more than a third of Russia's strategic cruise missile carriers. In a call with his US counterpart Donald Trump on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow would have to respond to Kyiv's assault. Speaking aboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump told reporters Ukraine 'gave Putin a reason to go in and bomb the hell out of them last night.' Russia's Ministry of Defense said its strikes were in response to what it called Kyiv's 'terrorist acts.' It was not immediately clear if the attack was the extent of Russia's pledged retaliation, or if Putin intends to escalate further. After the embarrassment of Kyiv's operation, there was a chorus of bellicose calls from pro-Kremlin pundits for a severe – potentially nuclear – response. Although Ukrainians had been buoyed last weekend by the news of Kyiv's successful operation, many were wary of how Russia might strike back. But after Friday's strikes, Kyiv residents told CNN they supported Ukraine's strikes against the aircraft Moscow has used to bomb Ukraine for more than three years. 'It didn't break us at all. The morale is as high as it was. We strongly believe in our armed forces,' said Olha, a 39-year-old from the capital who did not wish to give her last name. She said the apparent 'retaliation' from Russia was not so different to countless other nights of the war. 'Maybe (this was the retaliation), but maybe the retaliation is yet to come. Either way, it doesn't change our attitude towards the enemy or towards our country.' Meanwhile, Ukraine's general staff on Friday said it launched overnight strikes on two Russian airfields, where it said Moscow had concentrated many of the aircraft that had not been damaged in Kyiv's 'Spiderweb' operation last weekend. Ukraine stressed that the operation, which blindsided the Kremlin, had targeted the planes that Russia uses to launch missile strikes on Ukrainian cities and kill civilians. After Russia's large-scale attack Friday, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow had 'responded' to its destroyed aircraft by once again 'attacking civilians in Ukraine.' As daylight broke, images from Kyiv showed flames rising over apartment buildings and firefighting crews at work, with residents picking through the debris of damaged apartments. Several cars parked in the streets below were covered with shards of glass and slabs of masonry torn from the walls of residential buildings. Ukraine's air force said Russia's barrage comprised 407 drones, six ballistic missiles, 38 cruise missiles and an anti-radar missile. Of those 452 projectiles, the air force said it had downed 406, including 32 of the cruise missiles and four of the ballistic missiles. The other two ballistic missiles did not reach their targets, it added. The strikes also hit Chernihiv, near the border with Belarus, which was rocked by 14 explosions from drones and ballistic missiles, including cruise missiles and Iskander-M missiles, local officials said. Five others were wounded in strikes in the northwestern city of Lutsk, near the border with Poland. Footage geolocated by CNN showed at least four missiles slamming into the city, kicking up fiery explosions on impact. The Russian Ministry of Defense said it had also intercepted and destroyed 174 Ukrainian drones from Thursday evening to early Friday morning and had destroyed three Ukrainian Neptune-MD guided missiles over the Black Sea. All week, Ukrainians have been bracing for Russia's retaliation to last weekend's drone attack, which struck 34% of Moscow's nuclear-capable bombers stationed at airfields as far away as Siberia. On Tuesday, Ukraine also launched an attack on the Kerch Bridge, the only direct connection point between Russia and the annexed Crimean Peninsula, with 1,100 kilograms of explosives that had been planted underwater. After Trump's call with Putin on Wednesday, the US president said his Russian counterpart had told him that Moscow would have to respond to Ukraine's assaults. Trump's account of the call gave no indication that he had urged Putin to temper his response, to the dismay of many in Ukraine. 'When Putin mentioned he is going to avenge or deliver a new strike against Ukraine, we know what it means. It's about civilians,' Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Merezhko told CNN earlier this week. 'And President Trump didn't say, 'Vladimir, stop.'' Despite Trump's support for recent peace talks in Istanbul between Ukraine and Russia, on Thursday he signaled that he may be adopting a more hands-off approach, likening the war to a brawl between children. 'Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy,' Trump said in the Oval Office, while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz looked on silently. 'They hate each other, and they're fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don't want to be pulled. Sometimes you're better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.'
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Yahoo
How the US could be vulnerable to the same kind of drone swarm attack Ukraine unleashed on Russia's bomber fleet
Ukraine's shock drone strike on Russia's strategic bomber fleet this week has generals and analysts taking a new look at threats to high-value United States aircraft at bases in the homeland and abroad – and the situation is worrisome. 'It's an eyebrow-raising moment,' Gen. David Allvin, the US Air Force chief of staff, said at a defense conference in Washington on Tuesday, adding that the US is vulnerable to similar attacks. 'There is no sanctuary even in the US homeland – particularly given that our bases back home are essentially completely unhardened,' Thomas Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), told CNN. By 'unhardened,' Shugart means there aren't enough shelters in which US warplanes can be parked that are tough enough to protect them from airstrikes, be it from drones or missiles. Ukrainian military officials said 41 Russian aircraft were hit in last Sunday's attacks, including strategic bombers and surveillance planes, with some destroyed and others damaged. Later analysis shows at least 12 planes destroyed or damaged, and reviews of satellite imagery were continuing. The Ukrainian operation used drones smuggled into Russian territory, hidden in wooden mobile houses atop trucks and driven close to four Russian air bases, according to Ukrainian sources. Once near the bases, the roofs of the mobile houses were remotely opened, and the drones deployed to launch their strikes. The Russian planes were sitting uncovered on the tarmac at the bases, much as US warplanes are at facilities at home and abroad. 'We are pretty vulnerable,' retired US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Tuesday. 'We've got a lot of high-value assets that are extraordinarily expensive,' McChrystal said. The Ukrainians said their attacks destroyed $7 billion worth of Russian aircraft. By comparison, a single US Air Force B-2 bomber costs $2 billion. And the US has only 20 of them. Shugart co-authored a report for the Hudson Institute in January highlighting the threat to US military installations from China in the event of any conflict between the superpowers. 'People's Liberation Army (PLA) strike forces of aircraft, ground-based missile launchers, surface and subsurface vessels, and special forces can attack US aircraft and their supporting systems at airfields globally, including in the continental United States,' Shugart and fellow author Timothy Walton wrote. War game simulations and analyses show 'the overwhelming majority of US aircraft losses would likely occur on the ground at airfields (and that the losses could be ruinous),' Shugart and Walton wrote. A report from Air and Space Forces magazine last year pointed out that Anderson Air Force Base on the Pacific island of Guam – perhaps the US' most important air facility in the Pacific – which has hosted rotations of those $2 billion B-2 bombers, as well as B-1 and B-52 bombers, has no hardened shelters. Allvin, the USAF chief of staff, admitted the problem on Tuesday. 'Right now, I don't think it's where we need to be,' Allvin told a conference of the CNAS. McChrystal said the US must look at how to protect its bases and the aircraft on them but also how it monitors the areas around those facilities. 'It widens the spectrum of the threats you've got to deal with,' McChrystal said. But all that costs money, and Allvin said that presents the US with a budget dilemma. Does it spend defense dollars on hardened shelters and ways to stop drones and missiles from attacking US bases, or does it use more resources on offensive weapons that take the fight to the enemy? 'If all we are doing is playing defense and can't shoot back, then that's not a good use of our money,' Allvin told the CNAS conference. 'We've always known that hardening our bases is something we needed to do,' Allvin said, but other items have been given budget priority. Hardened aircraft shelters aren't flashy and are unlikely to generate the headlines of other defense projects, including planes like the new B-21 bombers, each of which is expected to cost around $700 million. And US President Donald Trump said recently the Air Force will build a new stealth fighter, the F-47, with an initial cost of $300 million per aircraft. 'The F-47 is an amazing aircraft, but it's going to die on the ground if we don't protect it,' Allvin said. Meanwhile, a hardened shelter costs around $30 million, according to Shugart and Walton. Last month Trump revealed another form of air defense for the US mainland, the Golden Dome missile shield, expected to cost at least $175 billion. Despite the huge price tag, it's designed to counter long-range threats, like intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from a different hemisphere. In Russia's case, the vastness of its territory was seen as a strength in its war with Ukraine. One of the air bases hit in Ukraine's Operation 'Spiderweb' was closer to Tokyo than Kyiv. But now Russia's size is a weakness, writes David Kirichenko on the Ukraine Watch blog of the Atlantic Council. Every border crossing may be an infiltration point; every cargo container on every highway or rail line must be treated with suspicion. 'This is a logistical nightmare,' Kirichenko said. And there is a direct analogy to the United States. US Air Force bomber bases are usually well inland, but accessible to vehicles large and small. For instance, all 20 B-2 bombers are stationed at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. It's about 600 miles from the nearest coastline, the Gulf of Mexico, but only about 25 miles south of Interstate 70, one of the main east-west traffic arteries in the US, with thousands of commercial vehicles passing by daily. Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, one of the homes of US B-1 bombers, sits just south of another major east-west commercial artery, Interstate 20. 'Think of all the containers and illegal entrants inside our borders,' said Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command's Joint Intelligence Center. 'That connection will trigger alarm in some US circles,' he said. Meanwhile, in the Pacific, even better US offensive firepower, like Gen. Allvin would like to have, might not be enough in the event of a conflict with China. That's because the PLA has made a concerted effort to protect its aircraft during its massive military buildup under leader Xi Jinping, according to the Hudson Institute report. China has more than 650 hardened aircraft shelters at airfields within 1,150 miles of the Taiwan Strait, the report says. But Shugart and Walton argue the best move Washington could make would be to make Beijing build more – by improving US strike capabilities in Asia. 'In response the… PLA would likely continue to spend funds on additional costly passive and active defense measures and in turn would have less to devote to alternative investments, including strike and other power projection capabilities,' they said.
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Latest Escalation Between Russia and Ukraine Isn't Changing the Course of the War
The empire strikes back. Last week, Ukrainian spies destroyed a large chunk of Russia's fearsome nuclear bomber fleet using small, smuggled drones. On Friday, Russia retaliated with some of the largest air raids against Ukraine to date. The Russian air raids killed eight Ukrainians and wounded 46. They also sent the message that, as Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, the current round of peace talks is over. On the whole, however, neither the Ukrainian guerrilla operation nor the old-fashioned Russian retaliation changed the course of the war. Russia has a slight, but not decisive, advantage. Russian forces have been gaining ground in Ukraine at a slow rate and high cost. Although they have continued to suffer from manpower shortages, Ukrainian forces have managed to inflict greater losses on the Russian side. The human butchery on the front lines can continue for the time being. Of course, the attack on the Russian nuclear bomber fleet matters a lot for the global balance of power. And Ukraine has grown quite bold at attacking Russian interests outside of Ukraine. Ukrainian operatives have reportedly blown up the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea, captured Russian mercenaries in Sudan, enabled Tuareg rebels to kill dozens more Russian mercenaries in Mali, and trained Syrian rebels to use drones against the former government of Bashar Assad, a Russian ally. Rather than changing the balance of forces on the battlefield, these moves serve two psychological purposes. On one hand, they blunt Putin's confidence that he can simply wait Ukraine out. U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly told European leaders last month that Putin doesn't want to end the war because he believes Russia is winning. On the other hand, Ukrainian operations help demonstrate Ukraine's usefulness to its foreign backers. Even more than having to justify the financial cost of U.S. aid, over $128 billion in total, Ukraine has to compete for scarce physical resources with other theaters of war. (Late last month, the U.S. military decided to move anti-drone proximity fuzes from Ukraine to American forces in the Middle East.) And Trump has made no secret of his belief that Ukraine is a freeloader that doesn't "have the cards." After the drone attack, Ukrainian spokespeople bragged that they do, in fact, hold "the cards." The Trump administration was reportedly very impressed by the "badass" Ukrainian attack. As one White House adviser told Axios, "you've got a chihuahua inflicting some real damage on a much bigger dog." Feats of reckless defiance might prove more effective than the half-baked scheme to market Ukraine's non-existent mineral wealth to Trump. Many political figures have misread Trump as someone who enjoys flattery. But he does not necessarily respect those who grovel before him, whether it's domestic politicians or allied heads of state, and he does enjoy winning over adversaries. Congress is also getting ready to impose new economic sanctions on Russia, something that Trump has threatened to do over the past few months. The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is fighting to "water down" the legislation, but the dispute seems to be more about keeping the president's options open to lifting sanctions than the strength of the pressure. Unlike in the Middle East, where U.S. enemies are relatively weak and American partners are extremely reliant on U.S. support, the United States does not have an easy "off" switch for the Russian-Ukraine war. Europe provides Ukraine with slightly more aid than the United States. Although U.S. aid to Ukraine has been massive—and irreplaceable in the areas of air defense and intelligence—Ukraine can fight on for quite a while with European support and its own domestic capabilities. "Both sides are suffering before you pull them apart, before they're able to be pulled apart," Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. "You see in hockey, you see it in sports. The referees let them go for a couple of seconds, let them go for a little while before you pull them apart." That's a lot of suffering in the meantime. A recent estimate put overall casualties of the war—which includes both wounded and killed—at 1.2 million troops since 2022. And the United Nations has recorded 45,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine throughout the war. Each of those numbers represents a family torn apart forever. However depressing the situation sounds, the fact that neither side has a clear path to victory means that they will both have to come back to the negotiating table. It's in America's interest for this war to end as quickly as possible, and as other conflicts show, the U.S. can do a lot of good as a distant but powerful mediator. The post The Latest Escalation Between Russia and Ukraine Isn't Changing the Course of the War appeared first on
