A Perilous Survey: What the New Survey from the Occupied Donbas Means for Ukraine

In October 2019, the Ukrainian company New Image Marketing Group (NIMG) on behalf of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future (UIF), an independent analytical center based in Kyiv, conducted face-to-face interviews in the occupied Donbas (the so-called ORDLO, a Ukrainian acronym for “certain districts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions”). The goal of the survey was to measure socio-political attitudes of the population in the unrecognized “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DPR) and the “Luhansk People’s Republic” (LPR). Overall, 806 individuals in the DPR and 800 people in the LPR participated in the survey.1 The survey questions focused on attitudes toward current political events in Ukraine, the socio-economic situation in the occupied Donbas, key Ukrainian political leaders and public figures, future plans to leave the occupied region, preferred sources of information, and future aspirations for the Donbas. Despite a sufficiently large sample size, the survey company reported that over a third of approached respondents refused to be interviewed (about 35% in the DPR and 34% in the LPR). It is possible that those who refused to participate were afraid to express their honest opinions if those opinions were not in line with the “official” views of the “governments” of the DPR and LPR. Thus, the results of the survey might be reflecting opinions favoring a pro-separatist, pro-Russian line.

Overall, the results of the survey indicate bleak prospects of reintegrating the occupied parts of the Donbas region into Ukraine. The majority of the residents of the occupied Donbas (80.5%) did not wish the “republics” to be reintegrated into Ukraine.2 They consider the Ukrainian government to be responsible for the Donbas conflict (84.5% of respondents) and continue to see Ukraine (14.3% of respondents) and “Ukraine’s fascists” (23.6% of respondents) as the main enemy in the war.3 The term “fascists” was used by respondents in response to an open-ended question asking to identify the opposing sides in the Donbas conflict. While the survey included a great variety of questions, I highlight here only some of the key findings that are most relevant to the prospect of reintegrating the occupied Donbas into Ukraine. In that vein, I will focus on how the residents of the occupied Donbas identify themselves, what their main concerns are, how they see the future of the Donbas, and how they perceive Russia and Ukraine.

NIMG claims to have used stratified sampling to produce a representative sample of the population in the occupied Donbas based on the latest available demographic statistics from 2014. Quotas were set with regard to respondents’ age, gender, education level, and the percentage of urban and rural population.4 However, the sample was rather disproportionate with regard to employment: of 1606 total respondents, almost half (45%) reported that they did not work (38% of respondents in the DPR and 51% in the LPR). Because the survey was conducted face-to-face in respond...