The press release was prepared by the Deputy Director of the Institute of Sociology of the NASof Ukraine, Doctor of Sociological Sciences Serhii Dembitskyi

From July 6 to 20, 2022, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted its own all-Ukrainian public opinion survey "Omnibus". By the method of computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI)based on a random sample of mobile phone numbers (with random generation of phone numbers and subsequent statistical weighting), 2,000 respondents living in all regions of Ukraine (except AR of Crimea) were interviewed. The survey was conducted with adult (aged 18 and older) citizens of Ukraine who, at the time of the survey, lived on the territory of Ukraine (within the boundaries controlled by the Ukrainian authorities until February 24, 2022). The sample did not include residents of territories that were not temporarily controlled by the authorities of Ukraine until February 24, 2022 (AR of Crimea, the city of Sevastopol, certain districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts), and the survey was not conducted with citizens who left the country after February 24, 2022.

Formally, under normal circumstances, the statistical error of such a sample (with a probability of 0.95 and taking into account the design effect of 1.1) did not exceed 2.4% for indicators close to 50%, 2.1% for indicators close to 25%, 1.5% - for indicators close to 10%, 1.1% - for indicators close to 5%.

Under the conditions of war, in addition to the specified formal error, a certain systematic deviation is added. In particular, if back in May, among all the respondents we interviewed, 2.5-4% lived in the territories occupied after February 24 (and this corresponded to the percentage of those who live there, because the generation of phone numbers was random), now due to the occupiers turning off telephone communication we managed to interview fewer respondents living in occupied settlements, in particular, their number is 0.2%. It is important to note that although the views of the respondents who lived in the occupation were somewhat different, the general tendencies were quite similar. That is, the impossibility to interview such respondents now does not significantly affect the quality of the results. There are other factors that can affect the quality of results in "wartime" conditions (see Annex 2).

In general, we believe that the obtained results are still highly representative and allow a fairly reliable analysis of public attitudes of the population.

85% of the population of Ukraine consider themselves first of all citizens of their country. At the same time, among different social categories of the population - age, regional, linguistic and ethnic, gender and settlement - there is no great difference in this indicator. Thus, among residents of the East, 81% consider themselves primarily citizens of Ukraine, among Russian-speaking Ukrainians - 81%, among Russian-speaking Russians – 78%.

To the question "Who do you consider yourself to be first of all?", which related to identity in the territorial and political contexts, almost 85% of the respondents chose the answer option "Citizen of Ukraine" (see Table 1). A little more than 6% consider themselves a resident of their settlement or region. Almost 4% called themselves a citizen of the world or Europe. About 3% consider themselves a representative of an ethnic group or a nation. A little less than 1% of respondents consider themselves citizens of the former Soviet Union. So, with few exceptions, the population of Ukraine considers themselves first of all citizens of their country.

Table 1. Who do you consider yourself to be first of all? Respondents had to give only one answer. In the table - %

Considering such unambiguous indicators, it is not surprising that a similar picture persists in different socio-demographic groups. In terms of age (Table 2), respondents aged 18 to 29 (81.7%), as well as respondents aged 70 and older (78.1%) deviate the most from the indicator of 85%. At the same time, in the youngest group, all other types of identity are slightly increasing, with the exception of citizens of the former Soviet Union (among young people, the size of this group is equal to 0%). In the oldest group, the increase occurs according to two alternatives - representatives of own ethnic group, nation, as well as citizens of the former Soviet Union.

Table 2. Who do you consider yourself to be first of all? Distribution by age, %

In the regional section, the Eastern region is somewhat specific (Table 3). Here, the size of civic identity decreases to 80.7%. Due to this decrease, as well as minor fluctuations in other categories, a small increase is observed among those who consider themselves residents of own locality or region and among those who call themselves citizens of the world.

Table 3 Who do you consider yourself to be first of all? Distribution by regions, %

In the context of ethnicity and the language used by the respondent, slightly different distributions were recorded among the respondents who communicated exclusively in Russian (Table 4). Among them, 88% of Russian-speaking Ukrainians and 78% of Russian-speaking Russians chose civic identity, while the increase was recorded for local and global identities. In turn, respondents who used different variants of a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian during communication practically did not differ in their answers from respondents who used exclusively Ukrainian.

Table 4. Who do you consider yourself to be first of all? Distribution by linguistic and ethnic groups, %

However, such age and regional differences are unprincipled against the background of the general picture. In other demographic groups - by gender and type of settlement - deviations are even less noticeable (Table 5)

Table 5. Who do you consider yourself to be first of all? Distribution by gender and type of settlement, %

The dynamic of changes in civic identity, which was recorded in 1992 and in the period from 2000 to the present, is indicative (data from the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine were used for this purpose). Thus, the civic identity increased almost twice - from 45.6% to 84.6%, thereby making all other types of identity marginal in the territorial and political context.

Commentary of Doctor of Sociology Serhiy Dembytskyi

In order to explain the changes, we divided the graph into 5 stages: 1) post-Soviet adaptation; 2) the first civil mobilization; 3) political polarization; 4) the second civil mobilization; 3) the third civil mobilizatio.

At the stage of post-Soviet adaptation, which was characterized by significant economic difficulties, but eventually led to economic growth in the early 2000s, civic identity, although shared by a relative majority of the population, was quite close to local or regional identity in terms of representation.

The revolutionary upheaval in 2004, or the first civil mobilization, led to a significant strengthening of civic identity, but did not initiate sustainable evolutionary changes in Ukrainian society in this direction.

Instead, political quarrels and corruption scandals in the Orange camp, as well as the revenge of Donetsk political quasi-elites, marked a period of political polarization, within which positive evolutionary changes were restrained. Again, the key alternative identity was the local along with the regional.

The mechanism of the regional conflict established by the Ukrainian political community as the principle of its existence and development naturally led to the second civil mobilization - another revolutionary changes in 2013, which, together with external aggression from the Russian Federation, launched stable positive evolutionary changes in the adoption of civic identity, which moderately strengthened during eight further years. Accordingly, local and regional identity became unequivocally secondary for Ukrainian society, although they maintained a relatively high prevalence.

Finally, the full-scale aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine at the end of February 2022 launched another revolutionary change in the attitude towards civic identity, or started the third stage of civic mobilization, in which other variants of territorial or political identity were given a marginal or auxiliary place. I expect that from now on, subject to the sustainable democratic development of Ukraine, the civic identity will not fall below the indicator of 75%.

Annex. Methodological comments on the representativeness of telephone surveys conducted during the war

Even before the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, there were a number of factors that negatively affected the representativeness of the polls (for example, the absence of a census for more than 20 years). A full-scale war, of course, greatly affects representativeness and complicates the work of sociologists, but does not make it impossible. Access to reliable data on the state of public moods remains relevant both for Ukrainians themselves and for our foreign partners (who, as the events of the past 5 months have shown, often underestimated and did not understand Ukraine and Ukrainians).

At the same time, in order to maintain objectivity, it is necessary to understand what limitations the war imposes on the conduct of sociological surveys. First of all, we pay attention to large-scale population movements. At the beginning of July, EU representatives estimated that 3.2-3.7 million Ukrainians - adults and children - are currently in these countries. There is no exact data on how many of them are adult citizens, but, most likely, it is about half. In addition, some Ukrainians left for other countries, except for the EU. In particular, a significant number of Ukrainians were forcibly deported to Russia and Belarus (according to some estimates, about 1 million). Among the approximately 30 million adult citizens (estimated at the time of the full-scale invasion), it can be roughly estimated that about 10% have left the country, and the method of telephone interviews cannot provide a reliable survey of these citizens. Even more citizens have become internally displaced persons, but they have a much smaller impact on the quality of telephone surveys, since almost all of these citizens have mobile phones and are reachable to participate in the survey (in fact, 14% of the respondents of this survey are IDPs).

Another important issue is the accessibility for the survey of the population of the territories that were occupied after February 24, 2022, due to the conduct of intensive military operations or due to interruptions in telephone communication. Now there is practically no connection. In May, 2.5-4% of respondents lived in these territories, now in the sample of residents of these territories - 0.2%. But it should be taken into account that a significant part of the population continues to leave these territories, therefore, most likely, no more than 1.5-2.5% of the total adult population of Ukraine are inaccessible due to communication problems.

In our opinion, a more significant impact on representativeness can have either a generally lower willingness of citizens with "pro-Russian" moods to participate in surveys, or the insincerity of those who did take part in the survey (given the obvious facts and prevailing opinions in the media regarding the Russian invasion , some citizens will not want to say what they really think "in public"). If to talk about the general willingness of respondents to participate in the survey, then in recent surveys we see either the same indicators or slightly lower (although it should be borne in mind that the lower willingness to participate of "pro-Russian"-minded citizens can be compensated by the higher willingness to participate of "pro-Ukrainian"-minded citizens).

We conducted a small methodological experiment in May, which shows that the citizens who are currently participating in the polls in terms of demographic characteristics and meaningful moods are close to those who participated in the polls until February 24, 2022. Preliminarily, we see some shift in the direction of "pro-Ukrainian"-minded citizens, which is reflected in up to 4-6% deviations for individual questions (in the direction of more frequent selection of answers that correspond to the "pro-Ukrainian" interpretation of events). In our opinion, this is a rather optimistic indicator in the current conditions. However, this experiment does not give an answer as to how sincere the respondents are now in their answers.

Taking into account our own observations and the experience of conducting surveys over many years, we still remain optimistic that, for the most part, respondents answer the questions sincerely. For example, the "imagined acquaintance" experiment shows little difference with the direct question. In addition, we assume that the demographic categories of citizens who have gone abroad and are unreachable for a telephone survey, at least now, do not differ very significantly in terms of a number of meaningful moods from similar demographic categories of citizens who have remained in Ukraine.

As a result, in our opinion, we should talk about a certain decrease in representativeness and an increase in error (in addition to the previously mentioned formal error, a certain systematic deviation is added due to the factors considered above), but at the same time, the obtained results still retain high representativeness and allow for a fairly reliable analysis of public moods of the population.