Yevhen Golovakha's interview on Suspilne

An interview with the Director of the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine, Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Corresponding Member of the NAS of Ukraine, Professor Yevhen Golovakha has been published on YouTube in the programme “Suspilne News”.

The journalist, expressing her satisfaction at the regular meetings with her guest to monitor public mood, proposed beginning the conversation with a characterisation of the state of Ukrainian society at this stage. In particular, she asked him to describe Ukrainians as concisely as possible, with the cares and anxieties we have now.

Summing up the results of the Institute's many years of monitoring research, its director answered as follows: “The mood is worse than it was in 2022, but better than in 2024. And that is the main thing, because we had a trend of worsening psychological state and assessments beginning in 2022, when there was a great surge of enthusiasm and morale, and the assessments were the highest in the whole history of independence.”

The sociologist explained the improvement of the mood in 2025 compared with 2024 by adaptation, or what some call the “normalisation of the war” — a certain getting used to its realities, when people draw on new psychological resources in place of those that have been exhausted:

“Our research records the extraordinary adaptability of most Ukrainians, although the number of people in a state of distress (acute stress) has grown over three years from 12% to 27%, and we understand that, sadly, further growth is expected, above all among those with a weaker psychological make-up. The losses of many Ukrainians are very great — the loss of relatives and loved ones, of work, housing, their place of residence, savings, health, including psychological health. To say nothing of the loss of thousands upon thousands of lives.” As the professor noted, according to the Institute's surveys only 20% answered that there had been no such painful losses in their lives.

The research showed that in 2022 4% of Ukrainians agreed to the terms Russia was putting forward, whereas now there are 16%, most of them living close to the front line. In 2022, 76% were confident of victory; now almost as many believe in it, yet only 40% are confident of it and 33% allow for the possibility of victory. The fact that Ukraine does not agree to Putin's ultimatums or to Trump's pressure corresponds to the state of Ukrainian public opinion.

The resilience of Ukrainians, their endurance, their ability to hold out, is high. For example, their assessment of Ukraine's economy today is twice as high as in all the pre-war years. And that is despite the loss of territory and of potential. People realise that they used to underestimate the state of their own economy, and not only that. They have begun to think more realistically. This showed itself, in particular, in the fact that to the question “What sum do you need in order to live normally in this situation?” people now name a sum one and a half times lower than the one they named in 2021.

As recently as March, 57% of Ukrainians thought Trump would help establish peace (20% did not), whereas now 70% are convinced that Trump will be unable to do anything in that regard. Yet, the professor stressed, we see a trend of growing populism and authoritarianism worldwide. There is a risk of our becoming the victim of an authoritarian international led by Russia, and the only hope is that the world's democratic international, above all the European one, will continue to support us. Ukrainians see the threat, and that is why the wish of most Ukrainians to integrate into the EU and NATO has grown considerably stronger, which was not observed before the full-scale invasion, especially in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.

The scholar also commented on the problem of young people, recalling the “cardboard” Maidan and the arguments for allowing the young to leave Ukraine, and analysed the problem of fairness in the context of who is mobilised and who fights and who evades. The view current among the public that members of privileged strata avoid mobilisation the sociologist called a pressing one, and he urged journalists to cover this situation more objectively.

As for the ratings of today's politicians, the sociologist named V. Zelenskyi and V. Zaluzhnyi, noting that Zaluzhnyi has the aura of the victories of 2022 and that his popularity may be explained, among other things, by the theory of imprinting.

Throughout the conversation Yevhen Golovakha frequently referred to the findings of the staff of the Institute he heads and of other colleagues, which showed that in the difficult conditions of war the country's sociologists keep a finger on the pulse of social processes and mass attitudes, and thereby provide a weighty basis for political and state decisions.

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