Henry Kirby in London -
After little more than a year in office, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s confidence ratings are sitting at less than 50%, according to a poll by the Kyiv Institute of Sociology.
The poll asked over 2,000 respondents to rate the performances of the two leaders in their respective positions, with surprisingly negative results. Across the whole of Ukraine, over 55% of those polled said that they had a negative opinion of Poroshenko’s presidency, while a massive 67% said the same of Yatsenyuk's work as PM.
Despite the poll excluding residents of Crimea – recently annexed by Russia – 77% of respondents in the southern regions of Ukraine expressed a negative opinion of Yatsenyuk.
While the East as a whole recorded a higher proportion of negative responses regarding Yatsenyuk, the conflict-ridden Donbas region had close to zero per cent of respondents offering positive responses regarding the prime minister, at a combined score of only 1.6%.
More surprising were the results from the generally pro-Kyiv West, where 63% of respondents had a negative opinion of the PM’s performance in his role. Just under half of Western Ukrainians thought poorly of Poroshenko’s work so far, at 47%.
The poll also asked respondents to rate their willingness to accept the occurrence of a number of hypothetical situations. Over a third of respondents across Ukraine said that they would accept a complete separation of Crimea from Ukraine – a figure that rose to 59% in the Donbas region.
At 48%, nearly half of all Ukrainians said they believe the country should adopt Russian as its second language. In Donbas, this figure sat at 77%.
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