73% of Ukrainians have a positive attitude towards the idea of their country possessing nuclear weapons, 20% do not support this, and 7% are undecided on this issue.
This became known from the survey results of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, conducted from December 2-17.
Details: At the same time, sociologists note that support for the idea of restoring nuclear weapons decreases if certain conditions are specified.
Literally from KIIS: "If we are talking about losing support and facing sanctions from the West, the positive attitude towards the restoration of nuclear weapons decreases to 46%, while the proportion of those who would not support such an initiative rises to 44% (the remaining 10% have undefined views)."
Details: However, if Ukraine has enough resources to endure until obtaining nuclear weapons, 58% would be willing to face the loss of Western support to acquire them. 33% would not support the decision to obtain nuclear weapons under such a scenario.
Sociologists emphasize that in all regions, the majority – from 61% in the East to 77% in the West – are generally in favor of restoring nuclear weapons.
KIIS also notes that trust in NATO does not contradict the desire to restore nuclear weapons.
"Moreover, when speaking about the general desire to restore nuclear weapons, those who trust NATO are the most eager for it," sociologists noted.
For reference: In 1994, Ukraine officially renounced nuclear weapons and signed the well-known Budapest Memorandum. According to KIIS, in mid-1994, 50% of Ukrainians believed that Ukraine should become a non-nuclear state, while 30% were in favor of possessing nuclear weapons. The remaining 20% had undefined views.
In the fall of 1994, sociologists posed the question with slightly different wording, but at that time, 29% supported retaining nuclear weapons, 42% supported the removal of nuclear weapons from Ukraine’s territory, and 29% had undefined views.
The study was conducted from December 2-17. Through telephone interviews based on a random sampling of mobile numbers, 2000 respondents aged 18 and older were surveyed.
The sample did not include residents of territories temporarily not controlled by Ukrainian authorities (at the same time, some respondents were internally displaced persons who moved from occupied territories), and the survey was not conducted with citizens who left the country after February 24, 2022.
Formally, under normal circumstances, the statistical error of such a sample (with a probability of 0.95 and considering the design effect of 1.3) did not exceed 2.9% for indicators close to 50%, 2.5% for indicators close to 25%, 1.7% for indicators close to 10%, 1.3% for indicators close to 5%.
Under the conditions of war, in addition to the aforementioned formal error, there is a certain systematic deviation, but sociologists believe that the results obtained still maintain high representativeness and allow for a fairly reliable analysis of public sentiments.