How does the population feel about supporting Ukraine?
How do citizens from Europe and the USA feel about their country supporting Ukraine in its resistance to the Russian invasion? Political scientists from the University of Konstanz and the LMU Munich are addressing this question in an open access article. They conducted a multi-country survey (USA, Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy) with around 10,000 participants in the summer of 2023, analyzing, among other things, the extent to which people back various support scenarios.
The study focuses on four main dimensions: human suffering, economic costs for one’s own country, political consequences for Ukraine and escalation risks. The results show that the majority of respondents across all countries are convinced that help is necessary – even if this comes at an economic cost to themselves. The researchers also make their research data and analysis scripts available open access.
You can find the open access article "Examining public support for Ukraine's defense against autocratic aggression" (doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-67913-z) on our publication server KOPS or on the nature communications website. The peer review reports are also freely available on this page.
The raw data (doi: /10.7910/DVN/UDBPS1) on which the article is based can be downloaded free of charge from the Harvard Dataverse.
The evaluation scripts (doi: /10.7910/DVN/UDBPS1), which were used for the analyses in the article, are also freely accessible in the Harvard Dataverse.