"Almost a third of Kazakhstani people justify the war. The research results demonstrate that Russian propaganda narratives continue to influence public opinion in Kazakhstan - almost a third of citizens (27.8%) continue to perceive the war, reproducing the most popular theses of Russian propaganda: 10.7% believe that Russia is conducting a special military operation against the Nazis in Ukraine; 17.1% are convinced that Russia is fighting with Western countries and NATO on the territory of Ukraine,” reads a report released on Thursday based on the results of a citizen survey entitled “Attitudes of Kazakhstani people to the war in Ukraine.”
The project is being implemented by the MediaNet International Journalism Center in cooperation with the PAPERLAB research center with the support of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. On the third anniversary of the war in Ukraine, Demoscope conducted another public opinion study. As noted, the data from the 2022, 2023 and 2025 surveys, conducted using a single methodology, make it possible to track the dynamics of changes in the perception of Kazakhstani people towards the conflict.
“In 2022, 33.2% of respondents supported the Kremlin’s agenda, and in 2023, 31.8% of respondents did. The stability of these indicators indicates the vulnerability of the information space of Kazakhstan, in which Russian content, including propaganda, continues to be actively present, consistently influencing a certain segment of the audience. The opposite perception of the essence of the war by the audience also remains virtually unchanged over the course of three studies. In 2025, almost a quarter of respondents (24%) answered that Russia is waging a war against Ukraine with the aim of occupying it and subsequently annexing it. (22.1% and 28.4%, respectively, in 2022-23). At the same time, almost half of the respondents (48.2%) found it difficult to answer this question," the researchers reported.
Photo source: picture from an open source