The most attention was drawn to President Donald Trump's erroneous claim on Tuesday that Ukraine "started" the Russian assault on Ukraine. During similar comments to the media at Mar-a-Lago, however, Trump also made another grossly false claim on Ukraine: that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has an approval rating of 4%.
Following Zelensky's election in 2019, Trump pushed for Ukraine to conduct its first presidential election. Ukraine, which has been under martial law since the Russian invasion in 2022, canceled the 2024 presidential election since the constitution forbids holding national elections while under martial law.
Trump said, "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," in response to a question on Tuesday about whether 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."
First, the facts: Trump's assertion is completely untrue. Zelensky has a far higher approval rating than 4%. In fact, several recent surveys have found it to be above 50%.
Zelensky told reporters Wednesday that Trump's "4%" remark was Russian misinformation. It is disconnected from reality, regardless of where Trump obtained the number—the White House did not reply to a CNN request for comment.
According to a study conducted this month by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, “the best and most reliable survey organization in Ukraine,” 57% of Ukrainians trusted Zelensky, Keith Darden, a professor at American University who specializes in Ukraine, told CNN on Wednesday. According to Darden, they ask about "trust" in leadership rather than "approval" scores. It is comparable to approval in Ukrainian, referring to a "sort of trust that they are doing a good job in their role."
Trump's "4%" assertion prompted the release of the new poll, but the organization's December survey indicated that 52% of Ukrainians trusted Zelensky. And following the Russian invasion in February 2022, Zelensky's confidence rating in the organization's polls was at its lowest.
According to Olga Onuch, a professor at the University of Manchester who works with other scholars to conduct public opinion research in Ukraine, their most recent survey, which was carried out between November 22 of last year and January 7 of this year, revealed that "63% of Ukrainians either approve fully or tend to approve of Zelensky's actions as president," CNN reported on Tuesday. According to her, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology also conducted their poll.
"We have never seen anything close" to a 4% approval rating for Zelensky, Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and Ukraine's economic minister in 2019 and 2020, told CNN on Tuesday. Zelensky's lowest approval ratings, according to Mylovanov, occurred in 2021, but even then, they were far higher than 4%. He cited a survey conducted in late 2021 that indicated that 26% of respondents approved of Zelensky.
Early in the conflict in 2022, Zelensky's popularity surged after a poll revealed that 90% of Ukrainians trusted him. Since then, it has dropped considerably. Trump, however, went beyond just asserting that Zelensky's approval rating has dropped.
