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July 15, 2024 - 4:40pm
Nearly half of Ukrainians think the time has come to enter into peace talks with Russia, a new poll has shown. The results from the Ukrainian newspaper ZN,UA‘s poll reveal that 44% think peace negotiations should start but an overwhelming majority oppose Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current demands.
Some 83% said they would oppose Ukraine’s hypothetical withdrawal from war-stricken regions such as Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia to begin talks, and 84% would not support ceding those regions permanently to Russia in negotiations.
Putin has demanded that Ukraine pull troops from contested regions to trigger a ceasefire, maintaining that this on its own will not end the war. He also insists that assurances be made from Kyiv and Nato that Ukraine will have a “neutral, non-nuclear status”. While a minority (35%) of Ukrainians reject the notion of peace negotiations, 58% oppose Putin’s demands for neutrality and a majority (61%) reject all concessions. In short, there may be support for talks but concessions will be hard to come by.
The polling shows a clear difference between opinion in the east and south of Ukraine — where the war is being fought — and the rest of the country. In the south, 60% of respondents said they were ready for peace negotiations, which was in marked contrast to the war-torn east, where only 33% think that talks should begin. In terms of Ukraine’s future neutrality, southerners were 17 percentage points more likely than the rest of the country to agree to Putin’s demands.
On average, just 14% of Ukrainians disagreed with the statement that Putin would only enter negotiations on his own terms compared to 39% in the south. Even putting aside probable Russian attempts to control public opinion, Putin strikes a very different figure in the south than in the rest of the country.
This major poll of public sentiment comes just weeks after the US promised a $2.3 billion military aid package. At Nato’s Washington summit last week, the alliance pledged a further $43 billion in aid and an “irreversible path” to membership. As of May 2024, Ukraine has received about $278 billion in aid, including $75 billion from the US.
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