More Ukrainians Back European-Type Reforms than Membership in EU, Study Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 8 – Sixty percent of Ukrainians say they believe their country should pursue the reforms that will transform their country into a European one, nine percent more than say they want Ukraine to be taken in as a member, an indication European values are spreading there even though prospects for EU membership remain distant, Ruslan Kermach says.

            Kermach, an analyst at Kyiv’s Democratic Initiatives Foundation, told a group of visiting Belarusian journalists about this and other ways in which the war in Ukraine has changed the geopolitical consciousness of Ukrainians in rapid and sometimes surprising ways (thinktanks.by/publication/2018/12/05/kak-voyna-izmenila-geopoliticheskoe-soznanie-ukraintsev.html).

            Russian aggression, he points out, “has not turned Ukraine toward the east.” Instead, it “has stimulated the growth of European integration attitudes,” with ever more Ukrainians wanting to be like Western countries and ever more wanting to join the key Western institutions, the European Union and NATO.

            Of course. Kermach continues, “one should not forget that the figure of support for European integration of 51 percent is as it were ‘the average temperature in the hospital.’ When we consider the regions, then in the West, support for European reaches 80 percent, in the center, 58 percent, and at the same time both in the east and the south … about a fifth of the population.”

            But playing upon these differences in the upcoming presidential election campaign is likely to be counterproductive, the analyst says, although he says that pro-Russian groups are likely to support neutrality rather than pro-Russian policies, itself a remarkable shift that has attracted less attention than it should.

            Another measure of the turn to the west is that a growing share of Ukrainians has a foreign passport and plans to visit EU countries, although on this measure too there are important differences regionally with far more in the west than in the center or the east saying they have passports and plan to travel there.

            “Only 17 percent” of Ukrainians now tells pollsters that Ukraine should not seek to integrate with Europe; and only seven percent say that the country should instead integrate with the Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Community. That is the likely size of support for any pro-Russian group.

            All these changes are the result of the war, Kermach says, an indication that Moscow has produced exactly the opposite effect that it wanted by engaging in military action against Ukraine.  Not only are more Ukrainians looking westward now than before, but they are also identifying more closely with their own state as a unified whole.

            Before 2014, regional and local identities were stronger than this national identity, which was typically at fourth or fifth place.  Now, it is national identity that is strongest with the other identities trailing behind.