But he may not be as wrong as mainstream media commentators have accused him of being. And the number he cited may be closer to the truth than the number Zelensky and the mainstream media cited.
Just prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky was not performing well in the polls. In 2021, polling showed that his popularity was in rapid decline. According to some polls, the Opposition Platform for Life, a party that Zelensky banned, was ahead of him.
Once the war started, Zelensky’s approval rating shot into the stratosphere, peaking at 84%. Zelensky was lionized as a heroic wartime leader who refused to leave his nation though he would surely be assassinated by the Russian invaders.
But his heroism was stage managed. When the U.S. offered to help him escape, Zelensky famously replied, “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.” At least that is what the Ukrainian Embassy in London says he said, and it is the story they spread. But the Biden administration says that he never said that. According to The New York Times, “The Biden team considers the story apocryphal… but was impressed by the mythmaking, which is a common tool of war.”
Refusing a ride, Zelensky stayed in Ukraine, telling the world he was not afraid. But that was stage managed too. Zelensky was, understandably, in a bunker, when then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who was mediating negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, told him that he had won a promise from Russian President Vladimir Putin that “I won’t kill Zelensky.” Zelensky asked if Bennett was sure. Bennett said he was “100 percent” sure. “Two hours later,” Bennett says, Zelensky went to his office, and did a selfie in the office,” famously telling the world, “I’m not afraid.”
Zelensky stayed, and his popularity soared. His high approval numbers were held aloft by a patriotic reaction to Russia’s invasion and by early successes in the war that boosted Ukrainian hopes and led to Zelensky’s hyperbolic promises of success, including expelling the Russian invaders and reclaiming all of the Donbas and Crimea.
But the war went badly. The Ukrainian armed forces, despite all the military, intelligence and financial support provided by the U.S. and its NATO allies, could not expel the Russian forces, and, instead of reconquering territory, they lost more. Ukrainians began to pivot their hopes toward negotiating peace. At the start of the war, 73% of Ukrainians believed that Ukraine should continue fighting until it wins. Recent Gallup polling shows that number has withered to 38%. For the first time, a majority of Ukrainians, 52%, believe what was once unthinkable: that Ukraine should negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible. Perhaps increasingly unaligned with the public mood, Zelensky continued to put fighting over negotiating, and his polling numbers began to decline.
A Gallup poll taken near the end of 2024 shows that Zelensky’s approval rating has fallen as the war has gone on. Once at 84%, it now sat at 60%. And that number may be a little optimistic, since the poll excluded people in Russian occupied territory.
Despite Zelensky’s boastful response to Trump that “[i]f anyone wants to replace me right now, then it just isn’t going to happen,” polling shows that it could happen. Internal polling seen by The Economist suggests that Zelensky “would lose a future election by 30% to 65% to Valery Zaluzhny.” Worse for Zelensky is that sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, of Freie Universität Berlin, told me in November that some readings of “closed polls” show that he would probably also lose to Kyrylo Budanov, the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense.
Zelensky and the mainstream media have refuted Trump’s 4% claim by pointing to one recent poll that found that 57% of Ukrainians trust Zelensky. But trust is not the same as approval, and the same methodological problems apply, since the sample group did not include people living in territories controlled by Russia. But there may also be an additional factor. The environment in Ukraine may have become one in which people are afraid to speak the truth in public polling.
That is the case made in a recent article published in The Spectator by a former senior official in Zelensky’s government who, publishing under a pseudonym, says that it is hard to trust public polls because “fear rules over a country where elections are indefinitely postponed, human rights are systematically eroded and fear dictates daily life.”
The former official says that, although “[p]ublic polls, aligned with the President’s Office, claim it remains at 63 percent,” “[p]rivate polling, which I have seen, now puts his support below 10 percent.”
If the pseudonymous former official is to be trusted, that is shockingly closer to Trump’s number than to Zelensky’s number or the numbers cited in the mainstream media. But, being pseudonymous, it is not clear it can be trusted. But, when I asked Volodymyr Ishchenko about polling numbers for Zelensky’s popularity, surprisingly, he responded with a number that was, like the former official’s, closer to Trump than Zelensky. “The polls I have seen,” he wrote to me, “gave Zelenskyi 16% of electoral support.”
The most recent poll showing numbers in the 16% range, Ishchenko says, come from a “pro-Poroshenko polling company.” Those loyal to Poroshenko have increasingly begun to undermine Zelensky since the president recently sanctioned Poroshenko.
With all the fear and infighting and methodological problems, it is hard to reliably read the polls. But there is evidence that Zelensky’s popularity is falling, that he is vulnerable in future elections, and that his approval rating may nearer to the number cited by Trump than appears at first, easy glance.
Source: AntiWar.
