Ukrainians Support Joining the EU and NATO

49% of Ukrainians believe Ukraine should seek to join the European Union, 27% prefer joining neither the EU nor the Eurasian Economic Union, and another 13.8% of respondents are in favour of joining the EurAsEC (with Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan).

These are the results of a poll conducted from 17 to 24 October by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

Experts also said that 41% of Ukrainians believe the country should strive for NATO membership, 37.1% that Ukraine should be a neutral/non-aligned state, and 13% vote for membership in the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

In addition, according to the poll, 50.9% of Ukrainians believe talks with Russia and pro-Russian militants representatives in non-government-controlled areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions to be necessary to achieve peace there.

At the same time, the institute stated that 38.9% of respondents believe Ukraine may not make concessions to Russia or pro-Russian separatists for the sake of peace in Donbas.

In total, 1502 respondents were interviewed during the survey. The survey was conducted with the CATI method (computer-assisted telephone interviews) based on a random sample of mobile telephone numbers in all territories controlled by the Ukrainian government. The sample was representative for Ukraine both in general and five macro-regions (the West, the Centre, the South, the East, the Donbas). The statistical sampling error (with a probability of 0.95 and without taking into account the design effect) does not exceed 2.6%.

Bohdan Marusyak