Russian Propaganda and Public Support for the War against Ukraine

• In Event: Unpacking Propaganda and Disinformation in Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

How has the Putin regime managed to sustain public support for Russia’s war in Ukraine in the face of major military failures and humanitarian losses? We address this question using data from the Russia Watcher project, a daily public opinion survey that tracks Russian attitudes toward the war in Ukraine. Our extensive dataset helps us isolate the effects of individual events and media narratives on Russian public opinion. We find that high support for the war among the Russian population is not primarily the result of preference falsification or lack of access to information. Using time series data and survey experiments, we show how state propaganda effectively frames information to generate popular approval for Russian military actions in Ukraine. Our research makes an important contribution to understanding the ways in which authoritarian regimes shape public opinion, particularly in the context of an unsuccessful military conflict.

Since the Russia Watcher project launched in mid-May 2022, we have conducted daily online surveys among a nationally representative sample of Russians. Russia Watcher’s regularity and flexibility make it more dynamic than traditional surveys, because we adapt our questionnaire to events as they occur in real time. Thus, the “treatments” our respondents receive are not predetermined, but emerge organically as the war develops. We are not aware of another dataset that provides such comprehensive and fine-grained information on Russian public opinion.

One of the greatest puzzles confronting scholars of Russia since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine is the remarkably high level of domestic approval for Putin’s “special military operation.” Most observers agree that this war has been disastrous for Russia: what was designed as a quick operation to seize Kyiv and depose Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has turned into a protracted and deadly conflict, with Russian casualties likely in the tens of thousands. Russia’s war has also generated a humanitarian disaster in Ukraine. Why, then, do a majority of Russians continue to express support for the war?

We argue that high, sustained public approval for the war cannot be explained by preference falsification or censorship. We test for preference falsification by running a series of list experiments and asking politically sensitive questions in multiple ways. While some Russians undoubtedly misrepresent their beliefs on surveys, their number is smaller than conventional wisdom might suggest. Nor is it the case that Russians are simply unable to access accurate information about the war. First, alternative sources of information about military failures and humanitarian tragedies in Ukraine are available. Second, our experimental results show that exposure to such information does not always generate opposition to the war, particularly in a context where Russian propaganda has systematically undermined trust in independent and foreign media.

In this paper, we evaluate the claim that Russian government propaganda generates support for the war by effectively framing information about Ukraine for a domestic audience. These strategies include but are not limited to national mythmaking and spinning threat narratives. To understand how these strategies work, we run a series of survey experiments that confront respondents with information about military losses and humanitarian crises immediately after these events take place. We test the effects of these official propaganda narratives against counter-narratives from independent Russian-language sources. Our outcomes are a set of questions about respondents’ emotions toward and beliefs about Putin’s “special military operation,” which are designed to disentangle the mechanisms by which propaganda narratives increase support for the war. We also investigate the heterogeneous effects of propaganda to identify what kind of respondents are most susceptible to Kremlin disinformation.

Our research makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on public opinion and propaganda in authoritarian regimes. Other public opinion surveys have shown that the majority of Russians support their government’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. Yet the infrequency of these surveys prevent us from drawing clear conclusions about what factors influence attitudes toward Russian actions in Ukraine. We leverage a uniquely comprehensive dataset to provide a better understanding of how autocrats use propaganda to frame information and avoid backlash from political and military failures.

Authors

• Isabelle DeSisto, Princeton University

• Grigore Pop-Eleches, Princeton University

• Jacob Tucker, Princeton University