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The 24th of February marked four years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and although peace talks are underway, an end to the fighting still seems far off.
The US has been leading the most recent trilateral effort to end the war, and while the negotiations have brought some humanitarian and technical resolutions, Russia and Ukraine remain deadlocked on fundamental territorial issues.
Moscow insists that Ukraine give up the entire Donbas region, for example, including areas still under Kyiv’s control and those that it claims to have annexed in illegitimate referendums.
Ukraine maintains that any deal must respect its sovereign borders, but it appears that some Europeans don’t necessarily agree.
A new YouGov survey suggests that Western Europeans are split on how much they want Ukraine to win the war, and how much they care that it does so.
Out of those surveyed, 79% of Danes say they care a great deal or a fair amount that Ukraine defeats the Russian invasion, followed by 70% of Brits and 51% of Germans.
However, this sentiment appears to be shared by fewer than half of French (45%), Spanish (44%) and Italian (32%) respondents.
The numbers reflect how exactly Europeans would like to see the war concluded, too.
Denmark (49%) and the UK (46%) are the most likely to want the West to support Ukraine until Russia withdraws, even if it means more fighting.
Whereas those in France, Germany, Spain (40-42%) and especially Italy (56%) are more likely to want a negotiated peace agreement, despite this meaning Russia may keep control of Ukrainian territory.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean they would be happy with this outcome: at least a relative majority in each country surveyed said they’d feel negatively about such an end to the war (34-58%), while only 10 to 22% said they’d feel positively.
In fact, many suspect that Russia would launch another attack against Ukraine, or even invade other European countries, within 10 years of any peace deal being signed.
This is once again especially true of respondents in the UK and Denmark. Some 68% of Brits and 65% of Danes think that it’s very likely or fairly likely that Moscow would start another war against Ukraine in that time.
Similarly, 62% of those in the UK and 57% Danish citizens believe it’s likely that Russia would start a war against a different European country.
Analysts point to the Baltic countries, due to their proximity to Russia and their history as former Soviet republics, and Moldova, as a neighbour of Ukraine and the Russian military presence in Transnistria, as some of the states most at-risk.
If Ukraine and Russia do reach a peace deal, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called for Western peacekeepers to be stationed in the country. Most Europeans appear to support this, according to YouGov, but it depends on the county.
For example, around two-thirds of the people of Denmark (66%) and the UK (62%) approve of sending soldiers to serve as peacekeepers in Ukraine.
The relative majority in France (48%) and Germany (44%) also agree, but support for the initiative among the countries surveyed is the weakest in Italy (35%).