UT Faculty Research Shows Dramatic Shift In Ukrainian Attitudes After Invasion
UT Faculty Research Shows Dramatic Shift In Ukrainian Attitudes After Invasion written by Randall Brown and originally published on the College of Arts & Sciences site.
A new study published by an interdisciplinary team of Tennessee researchers sheds light onto the dynamics of national unity experienced by Ukrainians following the 2022 Russian invasion.
While a nation would be expected to rally against an aggressive foreign army crossing its borders, researchers were surprised by the speed and magnitude of the unifying public attitude shift in Ukraine. They detail the findings in their paper, “Response to collective threat: Russian invasion unifies Ukrainians across ethnic, linguistic, religious and geographic lines,” published in January by The Royal Society.
Data: Before and After
The new paper stems from an ongoing survey project that monitors and measures the effectiveness of Russian disinformation across former Soviet republics (FSRs), led by Catherine Luther, the Minnie Doty Goddard Distinguished Professor in the UT School of Journalism and Media, and supported by the Department of Defense’s Minerva Research Initiative and the Office of Naval Research.
“We work with a third-party provider based in Eastern Europe that uses offline methods (face-to-face and computer-assisted telephonic interviews) that allow them to draw weighted representative samples in each of our selected countries,” said Luther.
The project conducted surveys in Ukraine and Belarus in 2021 and 2022, unintentionally creating a “natural experiment” before and after the onset of the Russian/Ukrainian war.
“Since our surveys began before the invasion, we captured unique data showing how public opinion shifted in response to the war,” said co-author Professor Alex Bentley, Department of Anthropology. “Ukraine and Belarus share linguistic and cultural similarities and have both experienced decades of Russian propaganda, making them appropriate for comparison.”
Before the invasion, surveys showed that both Ukrainians and Belarusians prioritized ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities when forming moral judgments about who was at fault over national and international tensions. In Ukraine, these identities strongly influenced views on who was good or bad, who to blame, and who was the victim. The invasion triggered an overwhelming change in Ukraine, cutting through prior divisions and narratives.
Ukraine Unites
“The shifts in attitudes were dramatic,” said Luther. “Although we expected certain shifts would take place, we didn’t expect to observe such significant convergences in attitudes.”
Their data provided evidence-based insight into a cultural dynamic: The importance of social identities become secondary to the need for personal survival when profound threats are made to people’s wellbeing.
“Even after Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan revolution and the annexation of Crimea, many Ukrainians, particularly in the southeast, still felt a strong affinity toward Russia,” said Bentley. “However, the full-scale invasion of 2022 overwhelmed these divisions and united the country against a common enemy.”
In contrast, attitudes in neighboring Belarus remained unchanged. Its authoritarian regime maintains closer ties to Russia, and even an “invasion next door” did not bring them the same shock as in Ukraine.
“Without the immediate threat of invasion and with stronger pro-Russian political control, Belarusian public opinion remained more stable and less polarized,” said Bentley. “While Ukrainian public opinion has long wrestled with diverse social identities—caught historically and politically between Russia and Europe—Belarus has remained more firmly aligned with Russia.”
Big-picture Teamwork
Luther, Bentley, and their co-authors brought important understanding of the historical, political, and social context to their study. In addition to their backgrounds in journalism and anthropology, the team included Assistant Professor Benjamin Horne and Associate Dean Suzie Allard, UT School of Information Sciences; Associate Professor Garriy Shteynberg, Department of Psychology; Professor Brandon Prins, Department of Political Science; and Joshua Borycz, librarian for STEM research at Vanderbilt University’s Stevenson Science and Engineering Library.
“I believe the research team we have in place reinforces the value of having an interdisciplinary team of researchers,” said Luther. “We all come from different academic backgrounds and fields of expertise that we feed into our research.”
Their results offer insight for the team’s extended project on Russian disinformation campaigns and their influence on Russian diasporas, funded by the Department of Defense Office of Naval Research.
“One part of this funding allows us to continue our research on the effectiveness of Russian propaganda in Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova,” said Bentley. “The other part is allowing us to further examine disinformation targeting Romania and Moldova, pairing civilian researchers with military experts.”
Bentley may also incorporate techniques from this paper when teaching the interdisciplinary Computational Social Sciences course CSS 201, in which students learn computational skills for finding patterns in large-scale social data—bringing this international lesson home for UT students.
UT Faculty Research Shows Dramatic Shift In Ukrainian Attitudes After Invasion written by Ernest Rollins and originally published on the College of Communication & Information site.