Recent polling for ECFR suggests that Europeans have come closer together in their support for Ukraine. But the factors driving this unity are fragile, contingent, and may not last…
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"The conventional wisdom is that wars end in negotiations. But their end is more often determined at the ballot box – or even in the opinion polls. A lack of public support brought America’s war in Vietnam to an end, the French war in Algeria to its close, and – with Slobodan Milosevic’s defeat at the ballot box in 2000 – ended the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Ukraine’s Western allies have so far been surprisingly united in their support for Kyiv. But Vladimir Putin surely hopes that Western public opinion will turn, leaving Ukraine high and dry.
In his state of the nation speech delivered a few days before the anniversary of his invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president made it very clear that he is positioning for a long war, hoping that the logic of democratic politics will exhaust Western support for Kyiv and allow Moscow to prevail."
"the results indicate that the desire for the war between Russia and Ukraine to end as soon as possible is no longer as popular among Europeans. In several countries – Estonia, Poland, Denmark, and Great Britain – there is now a clear preference for Ukraine to regain all of its territory, even if it means a longer war or more Ukrainians being killed and displaced. In Germany and France, the number of those who would like to see the war end as soon as possible has dropped significantly. In Germany, almost as many people now want Ukraine to regain all its territory as want the war to end as soon as possible. And in France, the long war option has a slight lead over the option to end the war as soon as possible. Only in Italy and Romania do many more people still think the war should end as soon as possible. "