How to achieve lasting peace

The thirteenth Sakharov International Conference on "How to achieve lasting peace? Ukraine and the world after the ceasefire" was held on May 18-19, 2023 in Vilnius. This conference set the task of considering the difficult issues that Ukraine will face after the end of the war.

In order to prepare for the conference, by order of the Andrii Sakharov Center for Democratic Development (Lithuania), the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted an all-Ukrainian sociological survey in February 2023. Here you can familiarize yourself with its results.

At the section on national reconciliation, the president of KIIS Volodymyr Paniotto gave a speech "Possible challenges that national reconciliation will face", here you will find the presentation.

Information about the conference:

The impact of the conflict in Ukraine was devastating: the destruction of infrastructure, an economic crisis, the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, tens of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of people who suffered from the consequences of the war. Now, experts have come together to discuss the complex challenges of rebuilding and the path to a sustainable future.

Although the war is far from ending quickly, many problems are already arising and it is important to prepare for the post-war period and form a better future. This conference provided an opportunity for a focused dialogue where key stakeholders were able to exchange ideas, insights and solutions.  Now, based on the work of experts, recommendations are being prepared for the government and civil society of Ukraine.

The conference's multi-faceted program covered topics such as democracy and the rule of law, recovery and ecology, trauma, memory and healing, national reconciliation and much more.

The conference organizers, led by Robert van Voren (executive director of the Andrii Sakharov Research Center and executive director of FGIP), managed to gather a very strong group of experts. From the Ukrainian side, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Andrii Dlygach, Olha Aivazovska, Myroslav Marynovych, Oleksandra Matviichuk, Valerii Pekar, Iryna Pinchuk, Tetiana Pechonchuk and others took part.  There were also representatives of European structures and ministries of some EU countries and scientists from Great Britain, Germany, France, Lithuania, the Netherlands and other countries. For example, Timothy Garton Ashe (United Kingdom), professor of European studies at the University of Oxford, Anna-Karin Kroksstad, deputy head of the Department for Ukraine at the European External Action Service, Eduard Klein - editor of the German journal Ukraine-Analysen and researcher at the Department of East European Researches at the University of Bremen and many others. See conference program  programa-konferencii-18-05-2023.pdf (sakharovcenter-vdu.eu)

Додаток 1. Інформація про опитування та методичні коментарі щодо репрезентативності телефонних опитувань, проведених під час війни

From February 14 to 22, 2023, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted its own all-Ukrainian public opinion survey "Omnibus". By the method of computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) based on a random sample of mobile phone numbers (with random generation of phone numbers and subsequent statistical weighting), 2,002 respondents living in all regions of Ukraine (except the Autonomous Republic of Crimea) were interviewed. The survey was conducted with adult (aged 18 and older) citizens of Ukraine who, at the time of the survey, lived on the territory of Ukraine (within the boundaries controlled by the authorities of Ukraine until February 24, 2022). The sample did not include residents of territories that were not temporarily controlled by the authorities of Ukraine until February 24, 2022 (AR of Crimea, the city of Sevastopol, certain districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts), and the survey was not conducted with citizens who left the country after February 24, 2022.

Formally, under normal circumstances, the statistical error of such a sample (with a probability of 0.95 and taking into account the design effect of 1.1) did not exceed 2.4% for indicators close to 50%, 2.1% for indicators close to 25%, 1.5% - for indicators close to 10%, 1.1% - for indicators close to 5%.

Under conditions of war, in addition to the specified formal error, a certain systematic deviation is added. In particular, if back in May, among all the respondents we interviewed, 2.5-4% lived in the territories occupied after February 24 (and this corresponded to the percentage of those who live there, because the generation of telephone numbers was random), now, due to the occupiers turning off the telephone connection, we managed to interview only 2 respondents (out of 2002) who currently live in occupied settlements. It is important to note that although the views of the respondents who lived in the occupation were somewhat different, the general trends were quite similar. That is, the impossibility of interviewing such respondents does not significantly affect the quality of the results. There are other factors that can affect the quality of results in "wartime" conditions (see below). In general, we believe that the obtained results are still highly representative and allow a fairly reliable analysis of public moods of the population.

Even before the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, there were a number of factors that negatively affected the representativeness of the surveys (for example, the absence of a census for more than 20 years). A full-scale war, of course, greatly affects representativeness and complicates the work of sociologists, but does not make it impossible. Access to reliable data on the state of public moods remains relevant both for Ukrainians themselves and for our foreign partners (who, as the events of recent months have shown, often underestimated and did not understand Ukraine and Ukrainians).

At the same time, in order to maintain objectivity, it is necessary to understand what limitations the war imposes on the conduct of sociological surveys. First of all, we pay attention to large-scale population movements. As of December, the UN estimates the number of Ukrainian refugees at almost 7.9 million. Obviously, due to various reasons, it is difficult to consider these data unequivocally accurate, but in general, the quite significant scale of departure from the country is understandable. There is no exact data on how many of them are adult citizens, but, most likely, it is about half. Among about 30 million adult citizens (estimated at the time of the full-scale invasion), it can be roughly estimated that about 15-20% have left the country, and it is impossible to reliably survey these citizens using telephone interviews. Even more citizens have become internally displaced persons, but they have a much smaller impact on the quality of telephone surveys, since almost all of these citizens have mobile phones and are reachable to participate in the survey (in fact, 12% of the respondents of this survey are IDPs).

Another important problem is the accessibility for the survey of the population of the territories that were occupied after February 24, 2022, due to the conduct of intensive military operations or due to interruptions in telephone communication. Now there is practically no connection. In May, 2.5-4% of respondents lived in these territories, now in the sample of residents of these territories - only 2 respondents out of 2002 surveyed. According to our estimates, the territory occupied by Russia as of the beginning of September (occupied after February 24, 2022) accounted for about 9% of the entire adult population. Taking into account the mass exodus of the population from these territories (most likely, we are talking about at least half of the population), as well as the fact that significant territories of Kharkiv and Kherson regions were liberated from this period, we estimate that no more than 3-5% of the total adult population of Ukraine were unavailable due to communication problems.

In our opinion, a more significant impact on representativeness can be either a generally lower willingness of citizens with "pro-Russian" moods to participate in surveys, or the insincerity of those who did take part in the survey (taking into account the obvious facts and prevailing opinions in the media regarding the Russian invasion , some citizens will not want to say what they really think "in public". If to talk about the general willingness of respondents to participate in the survey, then in recent surveys we see either the same indicators or somewhat lower (although it should be borne in mind that the lower willingness to participate of "pro-Russian"-minded citizens can be compensated by the higher willingness to participate of "pro-Ukrainian"-minded citizens).

We conducted a methodical experiment in May, which shows that the citizens who are currently participating in the surveys in terms of demographic characteristics and meaningful moods are close to those who participated in the surveys until February 24, 2022. Preliminarily, we see some shift in the direction of "pro-Ukrainian"-minded citizens, which is reflected in up to 4-6% deviations for individual questions (in the direction of more frequent selection of answers that correspond to the "pro-Ukrainian" interpretation of events). In our opinion, in the current conditions, this is a rather optimistic indicator.

However, this experiment does not give an answer as to how sincere the respondents are now in their answers. To assess the sincerity of responses to sensitive questions, in July we conducted another experiment using the "imagined acquaintance" method. The results showed that the respondents generally answered the survey questions honestly. That is, we have reason to say that during the interview, the respondents really answer our questions sincerely.