The Foreign Service Journal, March 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2020 29 improving after the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky in May 2019. According to the study, 56 per- cent of Russian respondents assessed their attitude to Ukraine as “good” or “very good.” A May 16, 2019, Ukrainian poll conducted by several Ukrainian survey and polling organizations showed that there is now a roughly 60-40 split between Ukrainians who have very or quite positive attitudes toward Russia and those who do not. According to this poll, however, Ukrainians still have a much more sharply nega- tive attitude toward President Putin himself. Only 12.6 percent of those polled described their attitude toward Putin as positive, 65.6 percent as negative and 16.6 percent as neutral, with the rest undecided. The results of a Pew Research Center Poll— “European Public OpinionThree Decades After the Fall of Communism,” pub- lished in October 2019—revealed that 79 percent of Ukrainians have a favorable view of the European Union, compared to 11 percent unfavorable and the rest undecided. Support for mem- bership in NATO has grown substantially since my time in Kyiv. During my tenure, support for NATO membership remained relatively constant at around 23 to 24 percent. As my colleague and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer noted in a June 6, 2019, article for Brookings Institution, polls over the past four years have shown pluralities—in some cases, even a major- A wounded Ukrainian soldier. ARTHURBONDAR