A handy guide for Donald Trump: what the polls really tell us about Zelenskyy's approval ratings
"Marco Polo told lies."
Yurii Andrukhovych
When Andrii Yermak, the Head of the President’s Office, returned from his trip to the United States in December 2024 with the feeling that he’d had a very chilly reception, no one could have imagined that a few weeks later Trump would be insulting Zelenskyy and openly lying about his approval ratings in Ukrainian polls.
In a much-talked-about podcast by Lex Fridman, Zelenskyy had outlined his vision of how the future peace process would unfold: first he and Trump would agree on positions, they would talk about security guarantees, and then they could proceed to putting pressure on Putin.
But recent events have shown that the new US president seems to have opted for a completely different course of action: talks with Russia have already started, preparations are underway for a Trump-Putin meeting in the near future, and far from putting pressure on the Kremlin leader, the US president has begun openly criticising President Zelenskyy.
It started with little digs at Zelenskyy during the election campaign. But by 19 February, Trump had reached the point where he was calling Zelenskyy – not Putin – an "unelected dictator" and virtually accusing him of starting the war.
But perhaps the most outrageous manipulation by the US president is the accusation that the Ukrainian president is avoiding elections because he has "a 4% approval rating".
Ukrainska Pravda immediately contacted most of the leading polling centres in Ukraine. We’ve analysed the latest polls and can confidently state that Zelenskyy has a trust rating of almost 60% and a presidential approval rating of about 16-20%. More details below.
Do Ukrainians want elections?
Donald Trump: "If Ukraine wants a seat at the table, wouldn't the people have to say, it’s been a long time since we’ve had an election?"
The issue of elections even during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has come up many times in Ukrainian politics. But every time a political party has started talking seriously about campaigns and voting, the same social safety catch has been activated.
Ukrainians are totally opposed to holding any elections until the war is over and the country has been given real security guarantees.
In the autumn of 2024, the Razumkov Centre released a poll that had yielded quite a paradoxical result. More than two-thirds of the respondents were in favour of a change in the ruling elite, yet only one-third was in favour of holding elections.
Much has changed since October 2024, but this paradox persists.
A survey conducted by the Socios polling centre in February 2025 shows that most Ukrainians are still strongly opposed to elections being held.
Fewer than 1% of the respondents would like only presidential elections to be held, about 3% are in favour of reelecting only the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament), and 29% support the simultaneous reelection of the Rada and the president. But over 63% believe elections should not be held until the war is over.
Do Ukrainians trust Zelenskyy?
Donald Trump: "We have a situation where we have martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine is down at 4% approval rating."
World history is full of unsolved mysteries. Who built the pyramids? Does the Loch Ness Monster exist? What is a UFO?
Another mystery was added to these unsolved riddles on 19 February: where did Trump get the figure of 4% support for Zelenskyy?
Ukrainska Pravda asked the leading polling companies in Ukraine to explain this, and none of them could understand where this strange figure had originated from. The most rational explanation seems to be that the Russians have "shared" their "secret sociology" with the Americans. There are no other suggestions.
On Wednesday, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology released a separate part of its recent major poll, which deals specifically with the level of support for Zelenskyy.
The latest KIIS poll shows that Ukrainian voters' trust in the president stands at 57% as of February 2025. 37% of respondents do not trust Zelenskyy, and another 6% are undecided.
Consequently, the balance of trust – the difference between those who trust him and those who don’t – is +20 for the President of Ukraine. That’s a result that many countries’ leaders could only dream of.
Meanwhile in the US, according to 538, one of the best-known American public opinion polling services, Trump’s rating as of February was 49.4% approval and 45.6% disapproval – that is, the balance of approval is approximately +4%.
In recent years, Zelenskyy's approval ratings have indeed been gradually falling compared to the abnormally high figures of February 2022. However, they are still over 10 times (!) higher than Trump's claim of 4%.
What is Zelenskyy's approval rating?
Donald Trump: "He [Zelenskyy] refuses to have Elections, ranks very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle’."
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s leading polling agencies have adhered to an unwritten gentlemen’s agreement: not to publish electoral ratings until the fighting ends in order to avoid dividing society into political camps.
This means that although polls are conducted, the results are not made public. However, the data has been circulating within political circles. Ukrainska Pravda, for instance, has had access to multiple polls over the past few months.
Read more: Long-distance relationship: is Ukraine ready for remote voting?
The only agency that has started systematically publishing political ratings is the Sotsys Group, which is linked to Ihor Hryniv, the former chief political strategist of Ukraine’s fifth president, Petro Poroshenko.
Many have expressed scepticism about these polls, given the possibility that Zelenskyy's performance, in particular, may be underestimated in them. That isn’t important for the purposes of this article, although a comparison with polls by other companies shows no bias.
But even the poll by Hryniv, who is hardly a Zelenskyy fan, clearly refutes Trump's claim.
Zelenskyy's presidential ratings are at least four times higher than Trump's figure of 4% or "very low" ranking.
In February, even with candidates such as Valerii Zaluzhnyi [Ukraine’s former Commander-in-Chief – ed.], Kyrylo Budanov [Head of Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence] and several other new names from the military potentially entering the race, President Zelenskyy firmly holds second place (after Zaluzhnyi). According to Sotsys, as of early February, his rating stands at around 16% – or approximately 22% of those who have made their choice and plan to vote.
Looking at the presidential ratings over time, there is a clear trend of declining support for Zelenskyy. However, this is not a headlong plummet like Trump’s meme coin plunge, but rather a gradual downward trend that has never dipped below 15% among all voters in the first round. Such ratings cannot be described as "low".
On 19 February, in response to Trump’s statement, the new Ukrainian research company Gradus Research, which specialises in fast digital polling, conducted a survey of 1,000 respondents. Their data put Zelenskyy’s rating at 23%, placing him in the lead. While this figure contrasts somewhat with other surveys Ukrainska Pravda has previously accessed, it still indicates significantly higher support than Trump claimed.
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There is a specific concept in sociology and psychology that’s known as the anchoring effect.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman dedicates an entire chapter to this phenomenon in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He argues that the human brain is not only inherently lazy, but is also prone to seeking cause-and-effect relationships where none exist.
Imagine being asked: "How old was Donald Trump when he became president for the second time – over 100 or under?" In this question, the number 100 serves as an anchor. Whether you realise it or not, your attempt to estimate the US president's age will be influenced by that number.
Scientists have proven experimentally that if the anchor were changed to "35 years old", people would recognise the absurdity of the figure – yet their estimated age for Trump, in this case, would be significantly lower than if the anchor was 100. The brain simply cannot believe it is being presented with a random number rather than a meaningful reference point.
The anchoring effect is one of the most common tactics for manipulating negotiations. On the morning of 19 February, Donald Trump, US president and author of The Art of the Deal, gave a vivid demonstration of that manipulation.
His claims quickly spread around the world: elections have not been held in Ukraine for a long time, Ukrainians want elections before peace talks, and, most notably, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s approval rating is just 4%.
Why four? Where did this number even come from? Why did Trump choose to mention it specifically? There are no answers to these questions. But whatever the Ukrainian leader does now, his actions will inevitably be compared to this fabricated "4% approval rating".
This, rather than any real support for Ukrainian democracy, appears to be the only tangible outcome of Trump's statements.
Author: Roman Romaniuk
Translation: Violetta Yurkiv and Yelyzaveta Khodatska
Editing: Teresa Pearce