A new joint poll from The Economist/YouGov concluded that Americans, when asked to choose, essentially are split on which country will win the Russia-Ukraine war.
However, a higher percentage of those surveyed would neither pick an eventual winner nor acknowledge that Russia or Ukraine has the advantage in a conflict that will hit the one-year anniversary Friday.
The poll chronicled the responses of 1,500 U.S. adults over a two-day period (Feb. 20-21) and had a margin-of-error rate of 3.2 percentage points.
Of those surveyed, 27% believe that Ukraine will prevail in the war. That's one tick higher than the 26% of respondents forecasting Russia as the eventual victor.
Among the uncertain crowd, 34% of surveygoers predict that neither Russia nor Ukraine will prevail, and 13% believe that both sides will declare victory when the war finally ends.
The Economist/YouGov researchers ran a similar survey a few months ago. In September 2022, 32% of respondents figured that Ukraine would win the war, compared to just 22% leaning toward Russia then.
From a sympathy standpoint, the U.S. respondents overwhelmingly sided with Ukraine (69%), compared to just 6% lending more empathetic support to Russia.
Along those lines, 56% of those surveyed currently view Russia as an "enemy" to the United States.
And from a pessimistic perspective, 27% of surveygoers cannot envision the Russia-Ukraine war ending within the next 12 months — a substantial bump from 10% of last year's poll respondents not anticipating the war going beyond 2022.
Also, 7% of those surveyed predict the Russia-Ukraine war will never end.
On Monday, President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Ukraine, in support of the citizens and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
And then on Tuesday, while speaking in Poland, Biden seemingly doubled down on his support of Ukraine, by saying his administration would "defend every single inch of NATO territory" from Russia.
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