CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten on Monday said Ukrainians have shown “absolutely major” shifts in their views toward Russia’s war on the country.
Enten, in a segment that aired prior to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s White House talks with President Donald Trump and European leaders, tossed to a Gallup poll conducted in early July that found a majority of Ukrainians (69%) want a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible.
Enten said that figure has gone “through the roof” since 2022 when, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Gallup found that just 22% of Ukrainians wanted a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible (compared to 73% of those who looked to fight until a victory).
“The idea that Ukraine is going to achieve complete victory, that idea has collapsed within Ukrainian society,” declared Enten in a segment with CNN’s John Berman.
He noted that a negotiated end to the war ASAP is a “bit more nuanced” as Ukrainians don’t want to agree to “all of Russia’s demands.”
“But I think the idea of even there being some territory that would be not formally recognized as being given, that Russia could in fact stay in. That does have majority support, but the idea of formal recognition of Russia’s demands? Absolutely not,” he added.
Ahead of Monday’s peace talks, Zelenskyy issued a statement emphasizing that the Ukrainian constitution “makes it impossible to give up territory or trade land,” signaling his opposition to ceding territory to Russia.
Trump — in a post to his Truth Social platform on Sunday — argued that Zelenskyy could end the war “almost immediately,” putting pressure on him to give up the illegally-annexed Crimea to Russia and agree not to join NATO.
Later in the segment, Enten turned to Gallup polling showing that 68% of Ukrainians indicated that the country will be unlikely for the war to end in a year compared to 25% of those that think otherwise.
There’s also been a drop in the number of Ukrainians who have indicated that they would like to join NATO in the next 10 years (32% now compared to 64% in 2022), per Gallup.