the new russian nationalism‘puppet of the West’ as well as ‘pro- fascist’. These are themes that
have featured very strongly in Russian television news program-
ming, reinforcing findings by other scholars that Russian TV has
had a significant influence on popular discourse in Russia about
Ukraine (Cottiero et al. 2015).
The respondents also display a striking disregard for the legiti-
macy and viability of Ukraine as a state. Asked what they thought
the borders of Ukraine should be, only 17 per cent favoured the
status quo ante, the borders that had been internationally recog-
nised as those of independent Ukraine after the USSR’s demise
and had been guaranteed by Russia in a 1994 treaty. All others
who gave a response asserted that Ukraine should be smaller in
one way or other. Nearly a third (29 per cent) thought Ukraine’s
borders without Crimea were most appropriate; another 17
per cent favoured lopping off all Russian- majority territories;
an additional 15 per cent held that the Donbas should not be
part of Ukraine; and 12 per cent replied that the only part of
Ukraine’s territory that should remain in the Ukrainian state was
the western Ukrainian regions that were not part of the USSR as
of 1930. Furthermore, more than a tenth (11 per cent) held that
Ukraine should not be an independent state at all.
In line with this view of Ukraine’s illegitimacy, respondents
tended to see the current events as having more to do with
Ukrainian domestic politics than with international forces. Asked
to rate the extent to which the Ukrainian conflict could be char-
acterised in various ways on a scale of 1 to 10, respondents were
significantly more likely to say that it was primarily a domestic
conflict among Ukrainian political forces (mean response 7) than
that it represented a struggle between different countries (mean
response 6) or different civilisations (mean response 5). Also con-
sistent with the narrative dominant in Russian television report-
ing is that respondents overwhelmingly (61 per cent) believed it
would be impossible for Ukraine to join both the European Union
and a Russian- led Eurasian Union; they thought Ukraine faced a
zero- sum choice between the two integration projects. Only 13
per cent felt that Ukraine could have the best of both worlds.
Other evidence, however, indicates that the respondents had
only inconsistently internalised the Kremlin’s narrative about