Washington
CNN
—
President Donald Trump’s false declaration Tuesday that Ukraine “started” the Russian war on Ukraine generated the most attention. But Trump also made another wildly inaccurate assertion about Ukraine during those remarks to the media at Mar-a-Lago: a claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has a 4% approval rating.
Trump was pushing Ukraine to hold its first presidential election since Zelensky was elected in 2019. The Ukrainian constitution does not allow national elections under martial law; Ukraine, which has been under martial law since the Russian invasion in 2022, called off the presidential election that would otherwise have been held in 2024.
When Trump was asked Tuesday if the US would ever support a reported Russian demand “to force Ukraine to hold new elections in order to sign any kind of a peace deal,” Trump responded, “Well, we have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine; where we have martial law, essentially martial law, in Ukraine; where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% percent approval rating.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is not even close to accurate. Zelensky’s approval rating is far higher than 4%. In fact, it has been above 50% in major recent surveys.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Zelensky described Trump’s “4%” claim as disinformation from Russia. Wherever Trump got the number – the White House didn’t respond to a CNN request for comment – it is detached from reality.
Keith Darden, an American University professor who studies Ukraine, told CNN on Wednesday that a poll this month from “the best and most reliable survey organization in Ukraine,” the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, found that 57% of Ukrainians trusted Zelensky. (Darden said, “They do not ask ‘approval’ ratings, but about ‘trust’ in leadership. In Ukrainian, it’s very similar to approval,” referring to a “kind of trust that they are doing a good job in their role.”)
The new poll was published after Trump made his “4%” claim – but the organization’s previous poll, from December, found that 52% of Ukrainians had trust in Zelensky. And that was Zelensky’s lowest trust figure in the organization’s polling since the Russian invasion in February 2022.
Olga Onuch, a University of Manchester professor who conducts public opinion research in Ukraine with other academics, told CNN on Tuesday that their latest survey, conducted from November 22 of last year to January 7 of this year, found that “63% of Ukrainians either approve fully or tend to approve of Zelensky’s actions as president.” She said their survey was also performed by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and Ukraine’s economic minister in 2019 and 2020, told CNN on Tuesday, “We have never seen anything close” to a 4% approval rating for Zelensky. Mylovanov said Zelensky’s lowest approval ratings were in 2021, but even then were much higher than 4%. He pointed to one late-2021 survey that found approval of Zelensky at about 26%.
Zelensky’s popularity skyrocketed early in the war in 2022, when polling found 90% of Ukrainians said they trusted him. It has since fallen significantly. But Trump didn’t merely claim Zelensky has a lower approval rating than he used to.