changes in russian nationalist public opinion 2013–14and parliamentary elections in October 2014, producing a coa-
lition government led by Arsenii Yatseniuk as prime minister.
These elections – held across Ukraine except for the annexed
Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces occupied by
anti- government forces – were held with extensive international
monitoring and were certified by the Organisation for Security
and Co- operation in Europe (OSCE) as free and fair (OSCE
n.d.). Figure 7.1 uses a box plot to represent patterns of answers
when Russians were asked in November 2014 to say how much
they agreed or disagreed that the Ukrainian leadership could be
characterised in different ways. The boxes represent the range
of positions taken by the middle 50 per cent of the respondents
and the vertical line inside each box indicates the median view.
As can be seen, respondents quite definitively rejected the ideas
that the Ukrainian leadership was legally in power, that it in
fact was representative of the people and that it had been freely
elected. Instead, they were generally in agreement that Ukraine’s
current leadership was not only corrupt, but simultaneously a
Figure 7.1 Agreement that the current Ukrainian leadership is...