On Feb. 18, 2025, during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a very low approval rating of just 4%.
Trump said, at time-code 19:05 (emphasis ours):
Well, we have a situation where we haven't had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law, essentially, martial law in Ukraine. Where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he's down at 4% approval rating.
The president repeated the claim around three minutes later, at time-code 22:43:
But when you see what's taking place in Ukraine with millions of people killed, including the soldiers, millions of people killed, a big percentage of their cities knocked down to the ground, I don't know how anybody even lives there, you know, when they say they took a poll, and Zelenskyy's at 4%.
The White House didn't explain where Trump's 4% figure came from, nor did the president's press office respond to our request for more information. There is no evidence to support Trump's claim.
On Feb. 19, Zelenskyy held his own news briefing where he told reporters he had evidence the 4% figure was "Russian disinformation," according to the Kyiv Independent, and pointed to recent polling that showed his approval rating was 57%. Snopes reached out to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ukrainian Main Directorate of Intelligence for further comment on Zelenskyy's disinformation claim and will update this story if they respond.
In response to Zelenskyy, claims circulated online — including from tech billionaire and U.S. government adviser Elon Musk (archived) — that the survey with the 57% rating was "Zelensky-controlled" or that the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, which carried out the survey, was funded (archived) by the United States Agency for International Development.
The KIIS survey
A public opinion survey from February 2025 that found 57% of Ukrainians trusted their president was carried out by KIIS, a private Ukrainian research company. The company is accredited by the Sociological Association of Ukraine, which upholds standards of sociological research in the country.
On Feb. 19, the day after Trump made his 4% claim, KIIS published a news release detailing the methodology behind its survey.
KIIS said it interviewed 1,000 respondents by phone about a range of topics for its Omnibus survey, a quarterly survey carried out for KIIS clients. The survey included the question: "How much do you trust or distrust Volodymyr Zelenskyy?" with respondents given a choice of answers.
The respondents were all adults over 18 years old who "lived in the territory of Ukraine controlled by the Government of Ukraine" on Feb. 4-9 when the survey was conducted.
KIIS summarized the results as:
As of the first half of February 2025, 57% of Ukrainians trust President V. Zelenskyi, 37% do not trust him. The balance of trust-distrust is +20%.
The news release also included a graph showing trust levels for Zelenskyy in selected months from 2019 to 2025, according to data collected by KIIS.
The graph showed a general decline in trust in Zelenskyy since a high of 90% in May 2022. February's numbers were slightly up from December 2024, when 52% of people said they trusted the president.
KIIS: Government controlled, USAID funded?
KIIS says on its website that it's a "private Ukrainian company." According to the website, KIIS offers sociological research services to clients, carrying out up to 150 projects for commercial clients per year.
USAID was listed among KIIS' clients, indicating that the agency had paid for research carried out by KIIS. However, there was no indication USAID had otherwise given money to the institute. KIIS was not listed as a recipient of aid on usaspending.gov, a database of U.S. government contracts and grants.
An example of USAID-related work carried out by KIIS includes a survey of "the vision of local government representatives on decentralization priority bills" conducted for Despro, a Swiss-Ukrainian local government reform NGO, in cooperation with USAID's Hoverla project, which also supports decentralization efforts in Ukraine.
As part of KIIS's Omnibus survey that produced the 57% Zelenskyy trust rating, researchers also asked respondents about their views on the suspension of USAID funding in Ukraine. The Omnibus survey allows clients to pay for individual questions to be included in KIIS' work. KIIS did not say who paid for the USAID funding question.
We reached out to KIIS to ask whether USAID paid for the Zelenskyy trust survey or funds the institute in any other way, but as of this writing have not received a reply.
There is no indication on KIIS' website that it is supported or controlled by the Ukrainian government. In addition to describing KIIS as a private company, the website did not bear a government seal or have a gov.ua URL. We also asked KIIS to comment on claims it is under the control of Zelenskyy or the Ukrainian government.
Zelenskyy flagging in election opinion polls in 2024
Further Ukrainian polling also found that though Zelenskyy might have a majority in Ukrainians' trust, it was in no way certain he could win a presidential election.
Data from SOCIS, another SAU-accredited survey company, from March 2024 found 32.5% of people would vote for Zelenskyy if he faced the popular ex-military chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi in the second and final stage of the country's presidential election process.
A similar survey by the NGO Advanced Legal Initiatives in December 2024 found that roughly 24.3% of people would vote for Zaluzhnyi versus 16.1% for Zelenskyy, if elections were held "today." Both surveys included Ukrainians living abroad.
Zaluzhnyi had not declared that he was running for president at the time of this writing, and there were no public plans for elections in Ukraine, which remained under martial law — preventing elections from taking place under the country's constitution.