Trump is the best campaign manager: Ukrainians trust their president more since he started attacking Zelensky

We're getting close to the point where, if a head of state or government wants to win the next election, they should pay Donald Trump to publicly badmouth them. According to a survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) between October 8 and 16, 54 percent of Ukrainians trust Volodymyr Zelensky, while 41 percent do not.

At first glance this isn't much of a change, since these were roughly the same figures in late August and early September. But the details reveal a lot. Before the announcement of the Trump–Putin "diesel deal" on October 8–9 and the fresh American pressure on Ukraine, only 43 percent trusted the president, while 52 percent did not. But between October 10 and 16, 57 percent trusted him, and only 39 percent did not. So within a few days Zelensky's approval improved by fourteen percentage points — and the American president deserves at least as much credit for that as the Ukrainian one does.

Anton Hrushetskyi, executive director of KIIS, says this is the well-known "rally round the flag" effect. He added that in 2025 it was already smaller and much shorter-lived than in 2022, and this time it may be even shorter. "If it weren't for the 'diesel deal' and the additional pressure on Ukraine, and if the trend observed on October 8–9 had continued, this would have been the first time we measured trust below 50 percent and a negative balance in this follow-up question," he said. In other words, Zelensky's popularity started to plummet exactly when Trump stepped in — and saved it.

On October 19, Trump said it was "time for somebody else to negotiate for Ukraine." Asked about Zelensky's claim that lifting sanctions would amount to supporting Putin, he replied that the Russian president wants to end the war, while Zelensky does not. Already on October 14, in an interview, the Ukrainian president said that by changing their policy toward Ukraine, Trump and those around him are choosing "the wrong side of history."

"If you're in the middle, stay in the middle, don't take the wrong side. I think his advisers are wrong. I don't know who's pushing him in the wrong direction,"

he said.

The reversal is not surprising at all. When Trump first began flexing his muscles against Ukraine, which was groaning under Russian terror, last year, he called Zelensky a dictator, publicly humiliated him in the Oval Office, and tried to plunder what was left of Ukraine with various raw-material deals — and Zelensky's popularity soared then too. According to KIIS data, in early February 2025, 57 percent of Ukrainians trusted him; after the February 28 Oval Office scene, by early March that figure had risen to 68 percent. Hrushetskyi explained at the time that Ukrainians perceived the new American administration's rhetoric not as an attack on Zelensky personally but on the whole country. So Trump has now been taught the same lesson twice: whoever attacks the president of a nation at war attacks the nation itself, and the nation then rallies behind its president. We can be almost certain that the White House won't get the message the third time around either.

Ugar