On December 10, New Europe Center organized presentation of the results of opinion poll “Foreign Policy and Security: Opinions of Ukrainian Society”. The event was attended by representatives of the diplomatic, expert and media environment.

The detailed results of opinion poll are available on New Europe Center site.

The opinion poll covered a broad range of foreign policy and security issues: security guarantees for Ukraine, formats of NATO accession, EU accession, preconditions for potential negotiations to end the war, levels of trust in foreign institutions and leaders, and more.

Olena Halushka, Member of the Board of the International Renaissance Foundation, co-founder of the International Center for Ukrainian Victory (ICUV), Member of the Board ANTAC, performed as expert-speaker during the presentation and commented some of the results:

• In my opinion, it is incorrect to link the assertion of the country’s corruption to the progress of joining NATO. Such kind of communication undermines trust in the work being done to fight corruption. After all, one of the main forces, the fundamental ground of the fight against corruption, is transparency in the activity of media-investigators, the efforts of civil society, when everything is brought to light in order to adequately “diagnose” and “choose treatment”. When this process of “diagnosing” is tied to the lack of progress in joining NATO, it undermines the trust in anti-corruption activities.
• The indicator of 63% of all the respondents who believe that Ukraine needs EU and US pressure to overcome corruption, though decreasing every year, is still quite high. So, it is necessary to clearly distinguish who is the driver of societal changes. After all, our partners often believe that the fight against corruption, reforms in the sphere of the rule of law, are imposed on Ukraine from outside, and we carry them out here, because that is what the EU, the IMF or other partners are asking. This is not the case, because in 2013, Ukrainians clearly communicated their subjectivity in this process, going to the Maidan for justice, fairness under the flags of the European Union. That is, European integration for Ukrainians is not the goal in itself, it is a tool for achieving all the necessary reforms in Ukraine.
• A large number of various so-called “peace” plans are currently being discussed, and it is not yet clear what there might be in those plans. However, there is one rather dangerous point that can be used for the negotiation process — the issue of removing sanctions from the Russian Federation. It is important to understand that there are 300 billion dollars of assets of the Russian Central Bank, which are currently frozen in the countries of the Group of Seven. This money has already partially started working for Ukraine. For example, Denmark together with the EU invested the part of revenues for 2024 in the production of Ukrainian weapons. France ordered Caesar howitzers and other weapons from itself to arrive in Ukraine. But if these funds are unfrozen now, and they are returned to Russia, instead of being invested in reconstruction or the purchase of weapons for Ukraine, then this resource will mean almost two Russian military budgets for the next year (140 billion dollars in the plans for 2025), which they will be able to invest in missiles, drones, tanks and so on to kill Ukrainians and the EU. These funds should be transferred to Ukraine as soon as possible.

Full news report about the event is available via link.

Photo report is here.

The record in English is here.

The record in Ukrainian is here.

Let us remind that this is the third opinion poll initiated by the NEC. The results of the first opinion poll can be found here, the second – here.

The presentation of the poll results is organized within the framework of a project supported by the International Renaissance Foundation. The poll was conducted by the research agency Info Sapiens at the request of the New Europe Center.