Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy was quick to correct US President Donald Trump’s recent false claim that he only had an approval rating of 4%.
Earlier this week, Zelenskyy’s government said that 65% of Ukrainians trusted their president.
The source of this figure wasn’t given but the results apparently stem from a survey of 1,200 participants published last weekend by the independent Ukrainian research organization Rating Group. The study also found that roughly one-third of Ukrainians trusted Zelenskyy completely, one-third trusted him somewhat, and one-third didn’t trust the Ukrainian president at all.
According to the survey, attitudes toward Zelenskyy have improved for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago, in February 2022.
In November 2024, his approval rating hovered around 53%, going up slightly earlier in 2025 to 57%.
Zelenskyy counters US claims
The sociological research organization Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) also conducted a survey among 1,000 respondents and found slightly lower support for Zelenskyy.
According to its results, some 57% of Ukrainians trusted Zelenskyy in early February, with the average support rate across all regions just over 50%.
This is the survey criticized by Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who is running, albeit unofficially, the US’ DOGE cost-cutting initiative. Musk and other Trump supporters claimed that KIIS was biased as it recieved funding from USAID — the US international development agency that Musk has taken aim at.
KIIS executive director Anton Hrushetskyi denies any KIIS bias, pointing out that the institute carried out the survey on its own initiative.
At the same time, the sociologist called into question Zelenskyy’s supposed 4% approval rating cited by Trump.
“Support for his decisions and trust in him are two different categories. That’s why we poll them separately,” Hrushetskyi told DW. “Support for Zelenskyy’s decisions is actually higher than trust in him, by several percentage points.”
Hrushetskyi said that although the KIIS survey conducted in the past few months showed that trust in Zelenskyy was growing, this could also be a short-term effect.
And it wouldn’t have be the first time the numbers had showed a short-term blip.
“When the president is seen abroad, when he speaks at summits and seeks support from the West, his approval ratings go up,” Hrushetskyi said. “But as soon as domestic politics come to the fore, with issues like corruption and mobilization, trust in Zelenskyy starts falling.”
Hard to survey Ukrainians in Russian-occupied regions
The Ukrainian territory that is under Kyiv’s control and therefore available for opinion polls has shrunk. “In [Russian-]occupied territories that receive Ukrainian mobile network coverage, we can still conduct telephone surveys,” Hrushetskyi said. But face-to-face interviews are too dangerous, the head of KIIS explained, meaning that occupied regions without mobile service were not included in surveys.
Olexiy Haran, professor of comparative politics at the University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy also told DW that determining shifts in the attitudes of Ukrainians living in occupied territories was difficult. But, he added, “it’s unlikely that these people could participate in an election, so their opinion barely has any impact on the president’s legitimacy.”
Another group of Ukrainians whose opinions were underrepresented in polls were the millions of refugees dispersed across the European Union (EU) and elsewhere, as Hrushetskyi pointed out. But their trust in individual politicians or institutions barely deviated from figures polled within Ukraine, so the expert.
Overall, however, the sociologist found that refugees were losing interest in Ukrainian politics. In May 2024, KIIS interviewed 801 Ukrainian refugees living in Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic and found that one third was no longer interested in Ukrainian news. Only one third indicated that they would take part in possible elections.
Putin casts doubt on Zelenskyy support
Russian President Vladimir Putin has also weighed in on Zelenskyy’s apparent approval rating. “It doesn’t really matter how much support he has, whether it’s 4% or whatever,” Putin told Russian media in a recent interview. “What’s important is that, according to our data, he only has about half the support as his closest likely rival, the former commander-in-chief [Valerii] Zaluzhnyi, who has been appointed to London.”
But Hrushetskyi finds it mistaken to draw such comparisons, because Zaluzhnyi, currently serving as Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, has not declared any political ambitions. “Still, he and other commanders are constantly included in opinion polls for possible elections,” said the expert, “which can distort results, since military personnel that people trust deeply can potentially draw votes away from other candidates.”
Zelenskyy’s ordinary term in office should have ended in May 2024, but with Ukraine still under martial law, new elections are currently prohibited. But Ukrainian research institutes are still permitted to conduct regular opinion polls, commissioned by various political organizations, keeping tabs on how people would vote in parliamentary and presidential elections.
“We don’t release these figures,” said Haran, who is also a research advisor at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, “because they could destabilize the situation in the country, given the war.”
But this unwritten agreement stands in contrast to a mounting debate over possible elections. Recently, the online news outlet Ukrainska Pravda released a survey by the Center for Social and Market Research (SOCIS) company. One of the key people associated with the firm, Ihor Hryniv, was a member of ex-president Petro Poroshenko’s political alliance in the former parliament. He also served as Poroshenko’s campaign manager.
Researchers for the SOCIS survey asked respondents who they would vote for if presidential elections were to be held in the near future, and offered the names of 13 candidates as possible answers. The list included the names of Zaluzhnyi, as well as three other high-ranking military officials.
According to the survey, Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence, scored 3.2% of potential votes, followed by the founder of the controversial far-right Azov Brigade Andriy Biletskyi (2.8%) and current commander of the Azov Brigade as well as officer of the National Guard Denys Prokopenko (1.3%). Far ahead of them all lies Zaluzhnyi with 27.2% of the hypothetical vote.
In the same survey, 15.9% were willing to back Zelenskyy for a second term, and 5.6% supported Poroshenko. The undecided vote remained high, with 21.6% unsure who they’d want to see in office.
This article was translated from German.
