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From early 2025, Ukraine’s war fortunes were looking increasingly dim. The United States stopped direct financial and military assistance, while Hungary kept blocking or delaying European support for Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was publicly scolded in the White House. Even though Kyiv accepted U.S. President Donald Trump’s 30-day ceasefire proposal and signed the multibillion-dollar mineral deal that Trump demanded, the White House largely refrained from putting meaningful pressure on Moscow to stop its relentless aggression against Ukraine. Indeed, Trump gave a red-carpet welcome at a U.S. military base in Alaska to Russia’s autocratic ruler, Vladimir Putin. On the battlefield, Russia continued to leverage its advantage in manpower, as well as air superiority, to make slow and costly, yet steady territorial gains. As an exceptionally cold winter arrived, massive Russian missile and drone strikes devastated Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, causing millions of Ukrainians terrible suffering. Finally, after Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz in response to the U.S. and Israeli attack in February 2026, the White House eased sanctions on Russian oil exports, allowing Putin to replenish his shrinking war chest.
Yet by mid-2026, Ukraine’s war fortunes had brightened. A comprehensive analysis by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW)—based on open-source intelligence, including sophisticated satellite imagery—concluded that Ukraine had not only blunted Russia’s advances but, for the first time since 2023, started regaining more territory than it was losing. The ISW also noted Ukraine’s successful degradation of Russian air defenses and logistics in occupied Ukraine and adjacent regions in Russia, with Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles registering a fourfold increase in hits on Russian military targets, along with a sixfold jump in hits on Russian drone launch positions, for the year ending May 2026. Videos documented spectacular Ukrainian attacks on critical energy and military-industrial facilities deep inside of Russia. Meanwhile, the Iran war proved that Ukraine had matured enough militarily to be able to provide valuable technology and expertise to its Gulf Arab allies, turning the narrative of Kyiv’s military dependency on the West on its head. Enabling this turning of the tide of the war was ordinary Ukrainians’ staunch commitment to freedom and independence, combined with their capacity for innovation and adaptation to hardship, the state’s mobilization of defense production and international networking, and continued Western military and economic support (albeit now with Europe at the center and sped up after the April 2026 parliamentary election in Hungary).
Survey data reveals both the social underpinnings and effects of the shift in the war, offering important insights into Ukrainians’ gritty determination to endure, their complicated and pained yet doggedly optimistic views of the war’s outcome, and their growing sense of Ukraine coming of age as a stronger, more confident international actor. These trends are worth a closer look—particularly given that societal resilience has been Ukraine’s strongest card in this long, brutal war. In this memo, we examine them with the latest, previously unreleased data from a computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) survey of 1,033 randomly selected respondents living across Kyiv-controlled Ukraine, conducted in April 2026 by the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology (UNASIS).
Ukrainians Assess the Nation’s War Fortunes
In line with ISW’s key assessments, our April 2026 survey data reveals a growing sense among Ukrainians that their military is more capable of stemming the creeping Russian advance. The shift is sizeable and statistically significant compared to the UNASIS August 2025 survey of 531 individuals, which used the same sampling and interview methodology and asked many of the same questions.
- The number of respondents who expected Russia to keep advancing and occupy more Ukrainian territory in the next year dropped from 30 to 19 percent. Conversely, the number of respondents who see Ukraine withstanding Russia’s advances and holding the front line mostly in place increased from 26 to 37 percent.
- At the same time, in a result that reveals Ukrainians’ understanding of the significant challenges and uncertainties ahead, the number of respondents expecting Ukraine to retake many or most occupied parts of the country remained approximately the same, at around 44 percent.
- Reflecting this rising guarded optimism, five times as many Ukrainians said Ukraine (41 percent) was closer than was Russia (8 percent) to achieving its objectives in the war. Nonetheless, half of respondents believe neither side at present is anywhere close to reaching its war aims. Only 1 percent of those polled said both sides are close to them—a sign of low public expectations for a negotiated war settlement materializing anytime soon.
- The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians in the April 2026 poll saw the situation on the battlefield for Ukraine as mostly “satisfactory” or “good” (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Ukrainians See War Fortunes as Mostly Favorable
Hard-Earned Confidence
We find a palpable sense among respondents not only that Ukraine is fighting for a worthy cause and ought to be supported with critical international assistance, but also that Ukraine has become a powerful, battle-hardened actor capable of shouldering the war’s burdens and tangibly contributing to the security of its partners and allies.
- More than half of those surveyed in April 2026 see Ukraine’s capacity to fight back against Russian aggression as “satisfactory,” while twice as many respondents see this capacity as “good” rather than “poor” (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Ukrainians Positively View Their Capacity to Fight Back Against Russia
- Breathing fresh air into the principle “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” most respondents in April 2026 (47 percent) said that ending the war would decisively depend on Ukraine—significantly more so than on the United States (24 percent) or the European Union (27 percent). Digging deeper into this question, which allowed respondents to pick several options, we see that three times as many people identified solely Ukraine as the decisive player (33 percent) than solely the United States (11 percent) or the European Union (10 percent) or both the United States and the European Union but without Ukraine (4 percent).
The growing confidence in Ukraine’s own power appears to boost how good people believe the international backdrop is for Ukraine’s war prospects (see Figure 3). A statistical analysis shows that more positive assessments of Ukraine’s war-fighting potential, as well as the view that Ukraine will play the decisive role in ending the war, are positively and nonrandomly correlated with perceptions that in the coming year the international backdrop will become more favorable to Ukraine (with 99- and 99.9-percent confidence levels, respectively, that the associations were not by chance).
Figure 3. Ukrainians Getting More Optimistic about International Backdrop
Endurance Capacity Rebounds
About 93 percent of people we polled in April 2026 reported experiencing some form of personal loss due to the war. Over 32 percent of them said their loss(es) was significant and 22 percent said it was bordering on the unbearable (maksymal’nyy). Here it is useful to compare our findings with those of the UNASIS July 2024 annual monitoring survey (N=4,101), which used CATI sampling of the adult population in Kyiv-controlled Ukraine and directed respondents to fill out an online questionnaire. Even as Ukrainians’ losses from the war accumulated from 2024 to 2026, we find a significant uptick in their readiness to endure hardship—such as power outages, price increases, and the constant need to react to air raid alerts, to say nothing of the death or injury of family and friends.
- The number of Ukrainians saying they can endure war-related hardship “for as long as it takes” has risen from about 50 percent in the 2024 poll to 58 percent today. Based on this, the Kremlin’s calculation that Ukrainians’ resilience will erode as the war goes on appears to be misplaced.
- Reinforcing the latter point, a correlation analysis shows that their willingness to endure hardship is unrelated to the severity of reported war-related losses. Instead, we find that resilience is nonrandomly greater among respondents who are more optimistic about Ukraine’s war fortunes.
- Ukrainians’ resilience has a lot to do with civic national identity: Among the 77 percent of respondents who identified themselves primarily as “citizens of Ukraine” when given a range of possible responses ranging from “citizen of the Earth” to “resident of their village/locality,” over 62 percent expressed readiness to endure war-related hardship indefinitely. This compares to 44 percent among respondents for whom being a Ukrainian citizen was not the primary dimension of their identity. Meanwhile, more than twice as many among the latter compared to the former said they could no longer bear war-related hardship. This relationship was also significant in our 2024 survey.
- Socialization is a powerful driver of Ukrainians’ resilience. Among respondents who are sure they can rely on their neighbors or people in their neighborhood to help them if they face a serious problem, 69 percent stated their readiness to bear war-related hardship indefinitely—21 percentage points higher than among respondents who said they cannot count on support from their local community.
Ukrainians as Realists
Most Ukrainians recognize that ending the war, well into its fifth year at the time of this writing, will be neither fast nor easy. Like in our August 2025 poll, about 70 percent of people we surveyed in April 2026 said they believe the war will last more than another year. It remains unclear whether the uptick in perceived war fortunes in favor of Ukraine will have any major impact in this regard. On the one hand, the number of people expecting the war to last another three years or longer has declined from about 27 to 19 percent; on the other hand, the number who found the question on the war’s duration hard to answer doubled, from 10 to 20 percent. Among respondents who did answer, the change is less pronounced, with the share expecting the war to last at least three years falling from 30 to 24 percent.
Here, we found it useful to listen to Ukrainians in their own words. In the April 2026 survey, we asked respondents, without giving them a fixed set of responses to choose from, “Given current conditions, what would you consider to be a victory for Ukraine in the war?” We read each free-form response before coding them with an inductive content analysis using Python software. The results paint a more complex, multilayered picture of Ukrainians’ preferences than the sorts of multiple-choice (fixed-response) questions typically used in previous polls, including our own, which implicitly prime respondents on territorial or military issues.
- Approximately one third of respondents said they had a hard time defining victory, unable to answer the question or giving a vague answer that lacked substance (e.g., “it will happen” or “I hope”). Another third explicitly associated victory with territory. The rest emphasized non-territorial issues such as ceasing hostilities, swapping POWs, repatriating Ukrainian children illegally taken to Russia, or securing security guarantees for the country.
- Among respondents who prioritize territory (N=316), 80 percent insist on Ukraine restoring its internationally recognized 1991 borders. The remaining 20 percent would accept a settlement in which Ukraine retained only the territory currently under its control.
- The open-ended question about what victory entails also reveals some polarization in Ukrainians’ mindsets. When telling us the first thing that came to their mind, respondents focused either on regaining all lost territory or freezing the conflict. Only 13 respondents (just over 1 percent) explicitly mentioned partially regaining occupied territory. In the 2025 poll, where regaining some of Russia-occupied Ukraine was an explicit answer option, over 30 percent of respondents picked it. We also learn from the open-ended question that Russia’s insistence on Ukrainian forces abandoning the 20 percent or so of the Donbas still under their control is a nonstarter—only three respondents mentioned this as a way for Ukraine to end the war victoriously.
- A significant number of respondents (N=215, about 21 percent of the entire survey) did not mention territory at all, saying they would consider a mere cessation of hostilities, together with an end to the loss of life, to be a Ukrainian victory. In practical terms, this response implies that regaining all occupied territory is not a priority for these respondents. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether they desire the return of at least some occupied territory and whether they would support any territorial concessions in a referendum, if actively primed on territory.
- Overall, the open-ended question indicates that territory and loss of life are the two key drivers of Ukrainians’ views on how the war should end. Other issues that have often been raised in public discussions around a potential settlement come through as secondary or marginal. Domestic political reforms are mentioned by 6 percent; the need to mobilize society by 7 percent; the return of POWs and abducted children by 2 percent; weapons supplies and production by 2 percent; and, perhaps surprisingly, the question of security guarantees and Ukraine’s membership in NATO and the European Union by just 2 percent. This does not mean that these issues are unimportant to Ukrainians; rather it indicates only that they are not front of mind for them when they consider the big picture around victory.
Conclusion
Well into the fifth year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine is emerging as a battered yet gritty, more self-reliant, and more confident fighter for its freedom and independence. Ukrainians are not superhuman, and many used the open-ended question in our survey to voice complaints about serious flaws in Ukraine’s democracy. Yet this is clearly not a Ukraine that looks ready to bend to Putin’s persistent, intransigent demands to cede even Ukrainian territory that Russian forces have proven unable to take, to limit the size of the Ukrainian armed forces, to foreswear deployment of peacekeepers from NATO member states, or to abandon the pursuit of Ukrainian membership in the European Union or NATO.
This is also not a Ukraine that will accept rhetorical assurances related to its security, no matter who is pledging on paper to back Kyiv. Even though the salience of territory varies widely across Ukrainian society, Ukrainians’ concern about saving lives means that their consent to any concessions, including territorial ones, will be contingent on tangible proof that Moscow will pay the highest possible price should it decide to resume armed aggression after any putative peace deal. The latest polling shows that this is a Ukraine that, as one of us has written previously, “would continue to fight on, and muster considerable force in so doing, even were it to lose the backing of the United States.”
Importantly, it is precisely an increasingly self-sufficient and self-assured Ukraine that promises the greatest “return” on international support for Kyiv—which makes such support all the more worthwhile and urgent. Not only is Ukraine keeping in check Moscow’s ambitions of breaking the Euro-Atlantic alliance and disrupting Russian support for Iran and other adversaries of the West, but it is also sharing its technological innovations and expertise with the United States and its allies in pursuit of their core national security goals.
Mikhail A. Alexseev is a professor of political science at San Diego State University and has been conducting survey research in Ukraine in collaboration with the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology (UNASIS) since 2015.
Serhii Dembitskyi is a deputy director of UNASIS and corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences; he designs and oversees UNASIS survey research with a focus on the sociopolitical effects of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Henry E. Hale is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University and the director of its Petrach Program on Ukraine; his most recent book is The Zelensky Effect (2022), coauthored with Olga Onuch.
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