The press release was prepared by Anton Hrushetskyi, executive director of KIIS

During February 4-9, 2025, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted its own all-Ukrainian public opinion survey "Omnibus", to which, on its own initiative, added a question about the suspension of USAID funding. By the method of telephone interviews (computer-assistedtelephoneinterviews, CATI) based on a random sample of mobile phone numbers (with random generation of phone numbers and subsequent statistical weighting) in all regions of Ukraine (the territory controlled by the Government of Ukraine), 1,000 respondents were interviewed. The survey was conducted with adult (aged 18 and older) citizens of Ukraine who, at the time of the survey, lived in the territory of Ukraine controlled by the Government of Ukraine. The sample did not include residents of territories temporarily not controlled by the Ukrainian authorities (at the same time, some of the respondents are IDPs who moved from the occupied territories), and the survey was not conducted with citizens who left abroad 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 1.3) did not exceed 4.1% for indicators close to 50%, 3.5% for indicators close to 25%, 2.5% for indicators close to 10%, 1.8% for indicators close to 5%.

Under the conditions of war, in addition to the specified formal error, a certain systematic deviation is added. Factors that may affect the quality of results in "wartime" conditions were previously cited by KIIS.

In general, we believe that the obtained results are still highly representative and allow a fairly reliable analysis of the public moodss of the population.

Among the first decrees of the USA President D. Trump was the suspension of funding for USAID - the US Agency for International Development. In Ukraine, numerous projects in various fields have been implemented with the support of USAID for several decades, so this decision also deeply affected Ukraine. The Ukrainian media immediately erupted in lively discussions about the projects in Ukraine and their impact. At the time of preparing this press release, the future fate of USAID was unknown, but we decided to ask Ukrainians how they perceive this suspension.

We should note that USAID projects were implemented in very different areas – from education and healthcare to supporting independent media. Ukrainians were mostly (and are) poorly informed about the projects. Ideally, we would have to find out the level of awareness of the population for each individual project and, after additional information, find out how useful this or that project is for Ukraine and Ukrainians. However, such an approach requires significant resources, which, unfortunately, are not available at the moment.

At the same time, emotionally, the discussions range from the conventional “they just eat up money and implement unnecessary projects” to the conventional “a tangible blow to Ukraine”. We can talk about the existence of a certain integral perception of “USAID projects in Ukraine” (and, most likely, not even only USAID, but in general an integral perception of projects that are implemented in Ukraine with the funds of Western partners). Therefore, we offered respondents to choose one of three options (see graph 1 below).

As can be seen, only a third of respondents share the conventionally extreme positions: 22% say there will be a significant negative impact, since the projects made a significant contribution to the development of Ukraine. At the same time, 12% share the opinion that there will be no particular consequences for Ukraine, since the projects mostly wasted money or engaged in unnecessary activities. The majority of respondents – 47% – believe that there will be some negative impact, but at the same time they feel a certain fair punishment for those who wasted money or engaged in unnecessary activities. And there are still 19% of Ukrainians who have no opinion on this issue.

Thus, the perception of the suspension of USAID funding is ambiguous among Ukrainians. On the one side, 69% recognize that the suspension of funding will have some or significant negative consequences for Ukraine. On the other side, 59% see an element of justice in this, since some projects “wasted money or engaged in unnecessary activities.”.

Graph 1. "In accordance with the Decree of the President of the United States, funding for various projects from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been suspended worldwide, and in particular in Ukraine. In your opinion, for Ukraine, this...?"

The graph below shows the data in regional dimension[1]. Despite some fluctuations, regardless of the region of residence, the attitude towards the suspension of funding for USAID projects is quite similar (and everywhere – quite ambiguous).

Graph 2. Perception of the suspension of USAID project funding in the regional dimension

A. Hrushetskyi, comments on the survey results:

Since the 1990s, KIIS has been fruitfully collaborating with a number of Ukrainian projects that received support from USAID. Of course, we cannot generalize our experience to all USAID projects in Ukraine, but we have indeed seen people who sincerely sought to change Ukraine and the lives of Ukrainians for the better, and the projects themselves have certainly made a significant contribution to the development of the country.

Together with this, it must be admitted that awareness of USAID's activities in general was not at a significant level (in some KIIS surveys in 2023-2024, less than a third of respondents to the question about knowledge of "USAID" answered that they knew what it was about, and of those, apparently, a significant part only had a superficial idea of the specific activity). Often, the activities of projects funded by our partners (and, in particular, USAID projects) became hostages to the narratives of external enemies and individual internal actors. The same narratives about "Sorosites" or about "the hand of the State Department" caused a lot of reputational damage and perception among the general population. At the same time, it is impossible to reduce everything exclusively to the deliberate undermining of the image of the projects. Individual projects themselves could insufficiently communicate cooperation with USAID (or in general focus more on building the image of the organization or public figure-leader).

In any case, the suspension of USAID funding is a clearly negative signal for our country and Ukrainians should not be too happy about this, but should focus on how to support the existence of projects that are truly important for the country.

Annex 1. Formulation of questions from thequestionnaire

In accordance with the Decree of the President of the United States, funding for various projects from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was suspended worldwide, and in particular in Ukraine. In your opinion, for Ukraine this… TOHALF READ IN ORDER 1-3, TO HALF – 3-1