PSCRP-BESA Reports No 150 (September 6, 2025)
The diplomatic blitz undertaken in August 2025 by the U.S. president, during which Donald Trump and members of his administration sought to persuade the leaders of Russia and Ukraine to make mutual concessions in order to end the active phase of the war that has been ongoing between these countries for three and a half years, had, as of this writing, produced no clear results that were even roughly acceptable to all sides. Although, according to the media, President Trump still assures his allies that the talks are proceeding according to plan, in practice these negotiations—which were supposed to culminate in a trilateral summit within a week—are moving slowly.
President Donald Trump’s hopes for a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky to conclude a peace agreement have not been realized, and Trump’s fallback plan, which envisaged a personal meeting between the presidents of Russia and Ukraine, has likewise not materialized. As a result, according to The Washington Post’s commentators, “recent optimism has faded, and Trump is looking for new answers.” One such answer, according to a remark by a disappointed Trump quoted by the media, is that if Kyiv and Moscow fail to reach any agreement in the very near future, Washington will withdraw from the negotiating process, leaving them to sort out their relations on their own.
Whether such a turn will occur or not, and what the subsequent course of events might be if either of the two scenarios is realized, depends on numerous strategic and operational circumstances. Not least among them are the level of trust in the leaders and the prevailing attitudes toward continuing military action or achieving peace as quickly as possible—not only among the elites but also among the publics of the two countries. A general—yet, by all appearances, fairly accurate—picture of these sentiments is provided by a series of polls conducted from May to August in the two countries by four reputable sociological agencies. In Ukraine, they were carried out by the American research service Gallup; the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS); and the Sociological Group “Rating.” In Russia, similar research on related topics was conducted by the Moscow-based Yuri Levada Analytical Center (the Levada Center).
Do Ukrainians Want the War…
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces on February 24, 2022, the collapse of Moscow’s plans to achieve Kyiv’s military and political capitulation within weeks, and the subsequent counteroffensive launched by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) a few months later resulted in a powerful surge of patriotism and unity within Ukrainian society. Despite the disappointment over the unsuccessful conclusion of the AFU’s active offensive operations in the summer and fall of the following year, 2023, and the transition of the conflict into a “war of attrition,” the overall mood of public sentiment initially changed very little. This was all the more so as subsequent events demonstrated that Russia, despite its overwhelming advantage in manpower and material resources, was incapable of securing a decisive victory over Ukraine.
On the other hand, it also became clear that Ukraine, despite massive military, financial, and diplomatic support from Western countries, was likewise unlikely to achieve a breakthrough on the battlefield. Growing awareness of this long-term reality, against the backdrop of mounting fatigue and a decline in the population’s willingness to be conscripted into the AFU, reinforced the public’s inclination to move toward negotiations that could bring the war to an end. Nevertheless, at least until mid-2024, for the majority of Ukrainians, judging by public opinion polls at the time, anything less than the withdrawal of Russian troops and the restoration of the country’s sovereignty within its “1991 borders” was hardly a matter of serious discussion.
It should also be noted that in Russia, by that time, more than half of the population, according to a Levada Center poll, supported a transition to peace negotiations. Yet at the same time, three-quarters of Russians, according to the same data, believed that Russia should not make concessions to Ukraine in order to end the “special military operation” and sign a peace agreement. All this, at least in the context of public opinion, looked like a “dead end,” with virtually no rational solution.
A certain shift in public sentiment, at least on the Ukrainian side, became noticeable with Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025. As is well known, he made ending this largest military conflict since World War II one of the main foreign policy priorities of the first half of his second presidential term—albeit, as noted above, still without much success. Thus, according to Gallup’s annual monitoring, in 2022 and 2023 only 22% and 27% of surveyed Ukrainian citizens, respectively, favored a diplomatic resolution of the conflict, while 73% and 63%, respectively, believed it was necessary to fight until Kyiv had fully restored sovereignty over all Ukrainian territories seized by Russia.
A turning point in attitudes occurred in 2024, when more than half (52%) of respondents supported a diplomatic solution, while those in favor of continuing the war until full victory over Russia (36%) found themselves, for the first time, in the minority. A year later this gap became even more striking: by July 2025 the share of respondents who believed that Ukraine should seek to negotiate an ending to the war as soon as possible had reached 69%, while only about a quarter (24%) of Ukrainian citizens still insisted on a military solution. Moreover, according to this study, “support for the war effort has declined steadily across all segments of the Ukrainian population, regardless of region or demographic group.”
Similar trends were captured by surveys on Ukrainians’ perceptions of peace plans, conducted in May and again in late July–early August 2025 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS). According to their findings, despite the continuation of active hostilities and the heavy civilian toll from Russian air and missile strikes on Ukrainian cities, public opinion still shows a readiness for negotiations. Thus, the joint Kyiv–Brussels plan, which envisaged Ukraine obtaining reliable security guarantees from Europe and the United States, advancing toward EU membership while Russia retained control of the occupied Ukrainian territories, and—should a stable peace be achieved—the gradual easing of international sanctions on Moscow, was supported in the two polls by 51% and 54% of respondents, respectively (with 35% and 31% opposed).
By contrast, Moscow’s plan—which, in exchange for agreeing to Ukraine’s progress toward EU membership, demanded a substantial reduction of Ukraine’s army and armaments, its renunciation of NATO membership, official recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the entirety (i.e., including the areas still controlled by Kyiv and the AFU) of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, as well as the lifting of all Western sanctions against Russia—was rejected by 82% of respondents in May and 76% in July–August.
Finally, the intermediate American “Trump–Vitkoff plan” is, according to the KIIS survey conducted in July–August 2025, accepted by 29% and 39% of respondents, and rejected by 62% and 49%, respectively. This can be seen as a consequence of the decline—documented in the Gallup Agency’s research—in the status of the United States as Ukraine’s main military ally, which in the eyes of Ukrainian society fell from 66% in 2022 to just 16% in 2025.
A similar result was obtained in a study conducted three weeks later (August 21–23, 2025) by the Sociological Group “Rating”: 59% of respondents supported stopping the fighting on the battlefield and seeking a compromise, 20% supported fighting until the return of Donbas and Crimea, and 13% supported fighting until the demarcation line/borders as of February 23, 2022, are restored. At the same time, 82% considered negotiations to be a realistic way to end the war (62% in favor of finding a compromise with the involvement of other countries, 20% in favor of direct negotiations with Russia).
In other words, judging by the slight increase in the share of those willing to support at least one of the proposed plans, Ukrainians today—albeit reluctantly—are allowing for the possibility of endorsing difficult decisions. At the same time, however, most Ukrainians harbor no particular illusions about the prospect of an imminent peace. Only 25% of KIIS respondents in the summer of 2025 believed that active hostilities were likely to end within the next 12 months, and just 5% assessed this probability as “high,” while 68% considered the end of the active phase of the war within a year unlikely.
Roughly the same opinion was held by Ukrainian citizens surveyed in May 2025 by the Kyiv-based Sociological Group “Rating”: only a quarter of respondents at that time believed that the negotiations then taking place in Turkey would bring Ukraine closer to peace. Nevertheless, three-quarters (74%) supported the then-relevant initiative (before Trump agreed to Putin’s proposal of “negotiations under fire”) for a 30-day unconditional ceasefire, believing that Ukraine should continue to demonstrate openness to dialogue. And nearly half (47%) thought that President Zelensky—whose approval rating among Ukrainians had stabilized at 70–74%, compared to 53–58% at the beginning of the year—could participate in such talks even in the absence of his Russian counterpart.
… and Do Russians Want Peace?
Given that “it takes two to tango,” it is important to understand what messages Russian society is sending to the authorities—or, more precisely, how in today’s Russian context the messages delivered through the media by the country’s leadership resonate with the public. An answer is provided to a large extent by the nationwide survey published in June 2025 by the Moscow-based Levada Center, whose report included comparative data from its ongoing monitoring of Russian attitudes since 2022.
According to this report, the peak share of respondents who considered it “definitely” or “rather” necessary to continue military operations in Ukraine (a combined 48%) was recorded in May 2023; at the same time, 45% of respondents thought it “rather” or “definitely” made sense to start peace negotiations. Two years later, in May 2025, the picture appeared to have shifted almost radically. Only 28% of respondents insisted on continuing the war, while nearly two-thirds (64%) of surveyed Russians believed that it was now time to move to peace negotiations—both record highs for peace supporters and record lows for proponents of continued fighting across all years of Levada Center research. At that time, an overwhelming majority of Russians—87%—supported talks between the Russian and Ukrainian sides in Istanbul; only 6% held the opposite view.
Two months later, in July 2025, two-thirds of Russians still supported the idea of moving to peace negotiations rather than continuing military action (a position held by less than one-third of respondents). This can therefore be seen as a fairly stable trend. Adding to this, nearly half of those surveyed in September 2024 said that the “special military operation” in Ukraine had brought Russia more harm than good—almost twice the share of those who thought otherwise (by May of that year, amid the new U.S. administration’s apparent “understanding” of Russian interests, the gap was less stark: 40% versus 33%). Taken together, the obvious conclusion is that Russian society has a clear demand for winding down the military campaign.
It is also reasonable to assume with a high degree of confidence that the majority of Russian citizens would be ready to support President Vladimir Putin, whatever peace formula he might propose. Indeed, as Russian researcher Alexey Levinson noted in early 2025, citing Levada Center survey data, when asked the hypothetical question, “Would you support President Putin if he decided this week to end the military conflict with Ukraine?” 65% of male respondents and 79% of female respondents answered positively.
However, rushing to such a conclusion is clearly premature. Responses to follow-up questions in the same study, cited by Levinson, regarding whether Russian citizens believed that Russia should make certain concessions to Ukraine in order to end the war and sign a peace agreement were negative in 65–77% of cases. In the following months this picture hardly changed: in July 2025, among various scenarios for ending the Ukrainian conflict, nearly three-quarters of respondents (73%) supported the option under which the parties would first eliminate the “root causes of the conflict” (which, according to the official government narrative, meant Kyiv’s departure from Moscow’s sphere of influence and its movement toward NATO and EU membership), and only after that agree to a ceasefire. The opposite view—that there should first be a ceasefire and end of hostilities, followed only later by resolution of other issues—was shared by just 18% of respondents.
“As much as people may want a ceasefire, the majority of respondents believe that the decision should be made by the authorities—‘they know better, and we are just ordinary people,’” observes Moscow sociologist Denis Volkov. “Most Russians have long wanted peace, but they leave the resolution of this issue entirely in the hands of the authorities” .