EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Breaking the Stalemate: Europeans’ Preferences to Expand, Cut, or Sustain Support to Ukraine

Bjarn Eck and Elie Michel

No typvk, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marked a turning point for European security. European countries have provided significant military and financial aid to Ukraine so far, but public support for such measures is a critical factor to sustain this assistance. In this article, we focus on two key aspects of public opinion on the war in Ukraine: whether Europeans want to increase, decrease, or maintain current support levels, and what factors shape these attitudes. Using survey data from six countries – Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland – fielded in June 2024, we find little evidence of war fatigue among the European public two years after the outbreak of the war. Most respondents express satisfaction with current aid levels, and a narrow majority in most countries even supports increasing aid, while around 10 percent firmly opposes any support. Importantly, differences in desired change seem unrelated to whether countries have been relatively large or small aid donors so far. Furthermore, support for aiding Ukraine is shaped by economic evaluations and national identity. Citizens who negatively assess the domestic economy are less supportive of aid, whereas personal financial concerns do not have such an impact. In addition, citizens who identify along national versus European lines are also more likely to oppose aiding Ukraine. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the challenges they pose for sustaining public support crucial to European security.

Date: 2024-12-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6751cf64577972f5adf452cd/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:typvk

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/typvk

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:typvk