Did Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's approval rating plummet to 4 percent, as of February 2025? No, that's not true: Lead Stories found no publicly available poll confirming the figure voiced by President Donald Trump on February 18, 2025. The White House did not reply to a Lead Stories request to disclose the basis for Trump's statement.
The claim originated from Trump's remarks (archived here) that followed signing executive orders at Mar-a-Lago on February 18, 2025. At the 13:32 mark, he said:
... the leader of Ukraine... I mean I hate to say it but he is down to 4% approval rating.
This is what the recording looked like on YouTube at the time of writing:
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Wed Feb 19 17:21:34 2025 UTC)
Trump did not specify what poll he was referring to in his remarks.
A poll (archived here), published on February 19, 2025, by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (archived here), also known as KIIS, placed Zelenskyy's approval rating at 57 percent:
As of the first half of February 2025, 57% of Ukrainians trust President V. Zelensky, 37% do not trust him. The balance of trust-distrust is +20% .Moreover, trust indicators have improved slightly compared to the last survey in December 2024, when 52% trusted him, 39% did not, and the balance of trust-distrust was +13%.
The authors of the poll disclosed that the survey sample was 1,000 people and acknowledged the challenges of researching public opinion during the war.
A search across Google News for the keywords seen here produced a single result (archived here). That article discussed a breakdown of the Ukrainian population's attitudes toward the Ukrainian military leadership and said nothing about Zelenskyy's rating in February 2025:
(Source: Google screenshot taken on Wed Feb 19 21:04:17 2025 UTC)
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Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims concerning Volodymyr Zelenskyy can be found here.
Fact checks of claims involving Donald Trump are here.
