You're reading: Survey: Ukrainians more optimistic than before

Ukrainians are optimistic about the future. Most of them hope the year 2020 will be better than 2019 and believe the country moves in the right direction, a new survey showed. 

According to the survey, published on Dec. 26 by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and Razumkov Center, over 60% of Ukrainians hope that 2020 will be better than 2019. 

Also, 44% of Ukrainians who took part in the survey think Ukraine moves “in the right direction.” In 2018, only 18% of Ukrainians thought so.

Additionally, 38% of the respondents think that the economic situation in Ukraine will change for better in two or three years. 

The survey also shows hope to be the dominating feeling of Ukrainians when they think about the future of the country (56%), while 38% are optimistic, which is 10% higher than in 2018. And about 26 percent of the respondents are anxious about Ukraine’s future, which is 7% lower than in 2018. 

However, the survey is not all positive. 

While Ukrainians are optimistic about the future, they’re negative about the current situation. Some 29% of respondents said they see more bad changes than good ones, and 47% said the situation in the country didn’t change in 2019. There is an improvement, however: Back in 2018, 67% thought the situation in Ukraine changed for worse. 

According to the survey, the situation with the cost of central heating, healthcare as well as social protection have deteriorated in 2019. 

The majority of the respondents (over 50%) don’t believe that the year 2020 will bring the rule of law or reduced corruption. 

Ukrainians are divided on whether peace in Donbas, where Russia has been leading a war against Ukraine since 2014, can be achieved in 2020. Some 33% believe it is possible, while 34% say it won’t happen.

The survey also shows Ukrainians’ support for NATO: many said that joining NATO would be the best guarantee for Ukraine’s security.  

In the same survey, 46 percent of respondents named President Volodymyr Zelensky the politician of the year, repeating a similar finding from a different survey. A former TV comedian Zelensky announced that he was running for president on New Year’s Eve, and won the election in a landslide in April 2019. 

Others were far behind in the survey: former president Petro Poroshenko, Batkivshchyna party leader Yulia Tymoshenko, Yuriy Boyko, one of the leaders of a pro-Russian party Opposition Platform For Life, Dmytro Razumkov, the speaker of the parliament, received from 2 to 7.5 % of the vote. 

Only two politicians, Zelensky and Razumkov,  were trusted by more people than distrusted.

The poll shows that 62% of respondents trust Zelensky and 43% think the current government is better than the previous one, run by then-president Poroshenko. 

While 23% see the Normandy Four meeting held in Paris on Dec. 9 as the “political event of the year,” another 6% consider it to be the impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump. 

Apart from that, 58% name 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections to be the events of the year. Another survey, published on Dec. 23, the prisoner swap between Ukraine and Russia when the countries exchanged 35 prisoners each in September was named the event of the year. 

Almost 60% of respondents also think that presidential and parliamentary elections were positive events for Ukraine. 

The survey questioned 2,017 adult Ukrainians from all regions of Ukraine, except Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, which are all occupied by Russia. It was conducted on Dec. 13-18, 2019.