Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelensky has an approval rating of 57 percent, according to a poll released Wednesday hours after US President Donald Trump said Zelensky’s rating was just four percent.
Calling for presidential elections in Ukraine, which are banned under martial law, Trump said Tuesday of Zelensky: “He’s down at four percent approval rating”, US media reported.
A telephone poll of 1,000 people by the respected Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 57 percent of respondents trusted Zelensky, while 37 percent said they did not and the rest were undecided.
The poll found trust in Zelensky had risen five percent since the last poll in December despite Ukraine suffering military setbacks.
The Ukrainian president’s rating soared to 90 percent in March 2022 after Russia invaded, according to the institute. Zelensky “retains a fairly high level of trust,” the poll’s authors wrote.
Trump’s comments echo claims by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Zelensky is not the legitimate president.
A Ukrainian law says that presidential elections are banned during martial law — which was introduced on February 24, 2022. If it were peace time, Zelensky’s term would have ended in May last year.
Critics have pointed to a conflicting point in the Ukrainian constitution saying that no president can serve more than a five-year term but must serve until a successor is elected.
Zelensky has argued that holding an election now is impossible because millions of Ukrainians are living abroad or fighting in the military and security risks are too high.
The poll’s authors said “the majority in Ukrainian society continues to adhere to the opinion that elections should be held after the war”.
It was unclear how Trump arrived at the 4 percent rating figure.
Russian political analyst Fyodor Lukyanov told AFP in Moscow Wednesday that this “figure is typical of Trump”.
The US leader “does not pay attention to boring things like facts and numbers”, Lukyanov added.
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