Attitudes Towards Russia and President Vladimir Putin and the Willingness to Help Ukrainian Refugees Among Americans

Abstract

The relatively recent Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused the displacement of millions of Ukrainians. Studies have found that Ukrainians have seen a warmer welcome and embrace than other groups; they have also shown that there is generally a higher willingness to help Ukrainian refugees than other refugee populations. This study explores American’s attitudes towards Russia and President Vladimir Putin, and the extent to which these attitudes predict American’s willingness to help Ukrainian refugees. In a sample of 201 participants, results showed that, even though negative attitudes towards Russia and President Putin were both high, negative attitudes towards Putin were significantly higher than negative attitudes towards Russia. In addition, negative attitudes towards Putin significantly predicted Americans’ willingness to help Ukrainian refugees but not negative attitudes towards Russia. Implications and recommendations for future research are also discussed.

1. Introduction

The recent Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused the forced displacement of millions of Ukrainians across state borders (Crisis Movements 2023). Amid this, reported perceptions of Russia from the outside world went from low to extremely low, and President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine have been condemned numerous times by international organizations, human rights commentators, and others such as United Nations General Assembly, Council of Europe, the European Union, OSCE, NATO, the African Union, ECOWAS, Pacific Islands Forum, Organization of American States, Caricom, Nordic Council, Institute of International Law, American Society of International Law, and others (Corten and Koutroulis 2023; Costello 2022). Some commentators even fear that the war on Ukraine is only the first part of a larger expansionist ambition which could threaten the rest of Europe (Axe 2023). This fear has led many Europeans to feel very threatened by him and in favor of helping provide weapons to Ukraine to resist Putin’s expansion. Additionally, people in various countries in Europe and North America have shown Ukrainians a lot of hospitality (Costello and Foster 2022). It appears that people are generally more willing to help Ukrainian refugees than they are willing to help refugees from other countries. Since the start of the conflict, there have been several studies that have attempted to explain why people have been so willing to help Ukrainian refugees (e.g., Xi 2023; Sajjad 2022; Politi et al. 2023; Kapetanovic 2022).

While some scholars have given evidence for the proposition that cultural similarity is the main explanation for this discrepancy (e.g., Sinclair et al. 2023), and others have made the argument that taking in Ukrainian refugees is done to show solidarity to Ukrainians and delegitimize Russia, whom they consider a rival (e.g., Sajjad 2022; Xi 2023; Chu 2020), no study to the best of our knowledge has sought out to empirically test attitudes towards Russia and/or Vladimir Putin as possible explanatory factors for American’s elevated willingness to help Ukrainian refugees in particular.

This is the first article to compare attitudes towards a country and its leader as competing predictors of willingness to help refugees. Answering this question is an important contribution to the field of social psychology, specifically with respect to the study of the psychological motivations for willingness to help, especially with respect to refugees, as it sheds light on how negative attitudes towards an outside actor that a group perceives as threatening can positively motivate willingness to help the victims of said actor. Furthermore, this psychological phenomenon has important implications for international relations and public policy and directly speaks to the age-old adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Proposing this mechanism is a theoretical contribution to both political science and social psychology by finding an empirical basis for a commonly held intuition of human behavior and intergroup perception. Additionally, while many have observed a trend of negative perceptions and attitudes towards Russia and Putin, no one to our knowledge has explicitly attempted to empirically distinguish whether the negative perceptions are more specifically directed towards Putin or Russia as a whole, much less how differently these two variables predict the willingness to help Ukrainian refugees. This is an important contribution to public opinion and international relations in that it investigates the extent to which present-day Americans really do hold a pernicious “Russophobia,” or whether their threat perceptions are specifically targeted at Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. Investigations of intergroup psychology on willingness to help are almost always embedded in some historical and political context, especially when it concerns refugees. By contributing this small kernel to the body of knowledge regarding the factors which motivate people’s willingness to help others, we provide an opportunity for future scholarships to generalize these questions to future investigations on variations in host countries’ willingness to help refugees from other groups and in other geopolitical contexts. The goal of this study is to fill these gaps. This study examines Americans’ attitudes towards Russia and President Vladimir Putin, and the extent to which they differently predict Americans’ willingness to help Ukrainian refugees.

1.1. Historical Context

Ukraine’s conflict with Putin began in 2013 when Ukrainian citizens were brutally persecuted and oppressed for protesting the then Ukrainian leader, Viktor Yanukovych, who, due to Russian allegiance and influence, stifled plans to more closely integrate with the EU, in favor of deepening relationship with Russia (Arhirova 2023). This turned into a revolution and ousting of Yanukovych, along with a newly invigorated shift in Ukrainian political culture from Russian identification to Western leaning; this immediately led to Russia mobilizing separatists in the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas, as well as Russia’s annexation of Crimea (Arhirova 2023). Kudelia (2025) further details in his book Seize the City, Undo the State: The inception of Russia’s War on Ukraine that local pro-Russian actors who were integrated into Yanukovych’s patronage system partly facilitated the Russian intervention in the Donbas region through low resistance, tacit accommodation, and, in some cases, overt cooperation with separatist forces. This antecedent to the invasion of Ukraine, however, has had little coverage from most Western “mainstream media” (Zollmann 2024).

Putin has claimed that the revolution was actually an American- and Western-funded Coup and uses this as a justification for invading Ukraine (The Economist 2022). Even though this might not be true, Putin’s anxiety about NATO’s eastward expansion is representative of the Russian perspective on increasing tensions with the West ever since the end of the Cold War. From Russia’s perspective, the eastward expansion of NATO is a broken promise on the part of the West: “In a meeting with Gorbachev on 9 February 1990, the then-US Secretary of State, James Baker, evoked the concept that NATO would expand ‘not one inch eastward’ on three occasions” (Savranskaya and Blanton 2017). Moreover, in 2008, Putin clearly expressed his concerns that the integration of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would be threatening to the Russian people (Mearsheimer 2014).

In any case, this conflict led to NATO escalations in Poland and other parts of the region, which was motivated by the national security interests of the Western nations. From US sanctions in 2018 to intelligence agencies noticing increased Russian military funding and build-up close to the Ukrainian border to failed peace negotiations, these tensions reached the most feared conclusion on 24 February 2022, when Putin announced a full-scale invasion, claiming his motivation was to “denazify”1 Ukraine and end the persecution and killing of Russians living within Ukraine (Council on Foreign Relations 2024). This war is one which greatly increases the potential for the use of nuclear weapons, as Putin himself has threatened; for this reason, Western powers have been successfully deterred from directly involving themselves in the war, and have been forced to resist Russia through more indirect means, such as the use of sanctions and the sending of weapons and funds to Ukraine (Council on Foreign Relations).

1.2. Ideological Context: Contrasting Attitudes and Perspectives Towards Russia and/or Putin

There is no doubt that Putin is commonly seen as a threat to the Western world, and that his regime frequently violates human rights (Human Rights in Russia n.d.). He is frequently suspected of being responsible for assassinating his political opponents, and for oppressively silencing dissenters to his rule (Human Rights in Russia n.d.). Most recently, he detained over 300 people for mourning the death of Alexie Navalny, a staunch critic of his who challenged him in elections. He nearly died due to “Novichok” poisoning at the hands of Putin’s orders, but barely survived thanks to medical supervision in Germany; when he returned to Russia to continue opposing Putin, however, he was immediately imprisoned near the Arctic Circle, and died a slow and painful death due to a combination of poor prison conditions, extreme cold, and declining health and increased medical problems for which he was refused treatment (Litvinova 2024; Stent 2024; Papachristou 2024).

Russian President Valdimir Putin’s widely condemned (Corten and Koutroulis 2023) invasion of Ukraine has already resulted in over 1.2 million casualties when combining civilian and military casualties on both the Russian and Ukrainian side (Jones and McCabe 2026). Putin has personally argued in writing that he chose to invade Ukraine because he sincerely believes that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, sharing a lineage to the “Ancient Rus,” and that the two states are “essentially the same historical and spiritual space” (Putin 2021, pp. 180–81).

Though negative sentiments towards Russia go back a long time, some have observed a significant rise of “anti-Russian Bigotry” (Siegal 2022). A 2014 Pew Research study found that only 16% of Russians and 12% of Ukrainians want a reunification of the two countries (Bell 2020). These things serve to increase fears of Russia and negative sentiments towards it and its leader. A Pew Research study has recently shown that global perceptions of Putin are negative, perceptions of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski are mixed, and perceptions of NATO are positive overall. That study showed that 82% of its survey participants hold unfavorable views towards Russia, and 87% have “no Confidence” that Putin “would do the right thing regarding world affairs;” negative views towards Putin from middle income countries like Argentina, Nigeria, Mexico, India, Brazil, Kenya, and South Africa have increased overall (Fagan et al., 2023).

O’Loughlin et al. (2024), however, found that, although views toward Putin were uniformly negative in Western countries, perceptions were more mixed in Russian-neighboring countries. They found that trust in Putin was higher in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus, and Moldova (O’Loughlin et al. 2024). Those countries which have higher trust in Putin, however, are more economically intertwined with Russia, and are more beholden to Russia’s influence (Vieira and Vasilyan 2021).

One investigation into Putin’s public portrayal, reputation, and persona in various different publics found that, even when people did not necessarily like Putin, they sometimes admired him for his personality, for his leadership, for his conservatism and defense of traditional values, and for standing up to US hegemony (Simons 2019). For example, some participants in Nepal, India, and Norway admired these various aspects of his character. In addition, some, namely those in India, were less exposed to negative media portrayal of him than others (Simons 2019). Perry et al. (2023) discovered that support for Putin and Russia have actually increased among American Christian Conservatives after the start of the current war in Ukraine; they argue that the cultural current of “Christian Nationalism” is to blame (p. 1). Perhaps this connection may also be attributed to Putin’s apparently perceived defense of traditional values, pointed out by Simons (2019). Hoffeller and Steiner (2024) also found that some members of the German public sympathize with Putin but argue that this is the result of “political alienation and a tendency toward conspiracy thinking” (p. 1). The findings of these researchers may be insightful for understanding the perception of Putin observed in the current study.

Negative views toward Russia stretch back almost “half a millennia” and go way beyond a fear of communism or “cold war mentality” according to Paul (2001, p. 104). Some regard the kinds of “phraseology” like that of Henry Kissinger, who said that Russia has “ ancient imperial drives,” and an “expansionist gene,” to be part of a larger condition of “Russophobia” and political and global elitism on the part of the United States and the West at large (Paul 2001, p. 104; Lieven 2000, p. 26). These attitudes of associating Russia with evil and barbarism seem to extend to the Russian people as well, according to Paul (2001). Some have argued that post-Cold War Western media has largely propagated and reinforced this negative portrayal of Russia as separate from the “civilized world” alongside the notion of the United States as a “leader of the free world” (Repina et al. 2018, p. 557; Hyzen and Van den Bulck 2024, p. 234; Feklyunina 2008).

The most controversial aspect of the implicit debate concerning Russia is the proposition that Russia was pushed to attack Ukraine because of the West’s apparent ambitions and efforts to expand NATO territory eastward. Similar to how the United States feared a communist “red spread” during the Cold War era, this argument makes the case that, from Russia’s perspective, the expansion of NATO could equally trigger a fear of a “blue spread” from the West, a blue spread that poses not only a “realistic threat” of military opposition, but a “symbolic threat” of contradictory cultural values (Corenblum and Stephan 2001). Many in the West, however, see this idea as treasonous. Covington (2024) for example, wrote a book chapter on this topic called “An empire of lies,” which captures the sentiment that Westerners should not indulge or entertain Putin’s propaganda to make himself out to be the victim of the West who was pushed to invade Ukraine out of self-defense. Ferraro (2024) argues that Putin’s attack on Ukraine was merely motivated by his concerns with increasing his domestic nationalistic popularity, and Minhas (2024) similarly argued that Putin falsely justified his attack on Ukraine using religious and nationalistic sentiments and rhetoric.

Westerners tend to see the values of democracy, state sovereignty, and human rights to be universal and hold that these values must be imposed on other nations for the sake of the stability of the world order. This ideology is most paradigmatically expressed by Western political philosopher Emmanuel Kant’s “Democratic Peace Theory,” which suggests that democratic nations never go to war with each other, but only with non-democratic nations, and that therefore world peace can only be achieved if every nation in the world becomes democratic (Simpson 2019).

Heller (2024) makes the more nuanced and novel argument that, rather than specifically blaming Western imperialism or NATO expansion, the main cause of Russia’s invasion is actually the humiliation caused by the West’s agentic misrepresentation of Russia, as well as its persistence in characterizing Russia as an uncivilized villain that must be opposed and discredited, rather than seen as a legitimate and equal world superpower. Heller (2024) also points out that Russia’s attack on Ukraine has been disadvantageous to its own interests, especially because it has led to Finland and Sweden applying for NATO membership. Thus, Putin’s own actions have only reinforced its status as a pariah and villain to the West and therefore increased the intensity of the very thing which he fears and most wishes to avoid. Heller’s prescription, however, is that the West needs to change its binary rhetoric of “east versus west,” “good versus bad,” and “civilized versus uncivilized,” as it is harmful to the Russians who are antiwar, and further solidifies Russian “disillusionment” and alienation against the West (Heller 2024, p. 184).

In sum, negative attitudes towards Putin and Russia in the West have existed for a long time but have intensified in recent years. Although some have a certain respect for Putin because of his persona of conservative traditionalism, long-held Western values of human rights, which have existed long before the Cold War, are ultimately the prevailing implicit source of these negative perceptions, and therefore have a deeply indelible cultural influence upon Westerners, especially Americans. Of those Americans who may have less negative attitudes towards Russia and/or Putin, however, it will likely be those of a more conservative ideology and who tend to be more distrustful of the Western mainstream media. Those who do distrust the Western mainstream media may also have divergent viewpoints regarding the hegemony of Western values and therefore be more sympathetic to opposing arguments which are more critical of the West. Chief among those arguments is the belief that Western pressure is in some way at least partly responsible for the tensions which have led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This implicit debate has been discussed many times, but until now has not been directly connected to Americans’ attitudes towards refugees seeking asylum from the destruction of this war.

1.3. Literature Review on Willingness to Help Ukrainian Refugees

This study contributes to the broader literature on people’s motivations to help others, and more broadly to the social psychological literature on intergroup relations, perceptions and identity. The literature on willingness to help is inherently intertwined with the literature on intergroup relations and prejudice because prejudice inherently reduces willingness to help members of an out-group. For example, Yitmen and Verkuyten (2018) find that a higher intensity of national identification decreases willingness to help Syrian refugees, while concerns with humanitarianism increase it. Fraser and Murakami (2021) also find that, when host country members generally have humanitarian dispositions and perceive that refugees are victims of random events, they are more willing to help. Stürmer et al. (2006) found that, although general empathy dispositions are predictive of willingness to help those in need, the effect is magnified when the person in need is a member of the in-group. Ferwerda et al. (2017) showed that negative media framings of refugee groups can negatively impact willingness to help those refugees; furthermore, they showed that people are generally less willing to help when those refugee groups are coming to their own local communities.

The willingness to help literature is also tied to individual-level social psychology which is not necessarily related to group identity. For example, foundational social psychology findings on the bystander effect—that people will not help someone in need if they observe that other bystanders are also not helping (Darley and Latane 1968)—have inspired a global-level analog in which members of countries feel less willing to help victims of global emergencies if they see that other bystander countries are also not helping (Albayrak-Aydemir and Gleibs 2021). Böhm et al. (2018), taking an economic perspective, found that high costs associated with helping refugees can decrease willingness to help, while higher need on the part of those groups can increase it. Echterhoff et al. (2022) found that, when people perceive that refugees are victims of forces or situations that are outside of their own control, people are more willing to help them. Finally, Bobowik et al. (2024) found that stimuli which increase “felt emotions” such as seeing images of refugees with “tearful faces” increase people’s willingness to help them.

The recent war in Ukraine has caused the displacement of over 10 million Ukrainians (UNHCR 2024). This happened against the backdrop of a recent increase in negative attitudes towards immigration and refugees in Europe and the West. Yet it seems that Ukrainian refugees have been welcomed much more warmly than other refugee groups (Costello and Foster 2022; Olatokun n.d.). A recent study found that Europeans have developed improved attitudes towards refugees in general after the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Moise et al. 2024). With improved attitudes towards a group comes improved willingness to help those groups. Hellmann et al. (2021) found that the three main factors which predict willingness to help refugees are shared local identity, perception of closeness and warm-heartedness, and general pro-sociality and left-wing orientation. They define willingness to help as altruistic behavior towards a group in need.

Another study found that willingness to help the impoverished was closely associated with emotions such as compassion and empathy, and that explanations as to the cause of the poverty greatly increased people’s willingness to help the poor either through donations or by agreeing to provide government aid (Yúdica et al. 2021). Another researcher found that, when priming a test subject with the idea of “oneness with all of humanity,” they became more willing to help both Syrians and Ukrainians through donations (Bilgen et al. 2024, p. 1). With the recent surge of Ukrainian refugees coming to the United States, it is important to understand the factors that predict Americans’ willingness to help them.

Some have argued that the main reason for higher willingness to help Ukrainians is a feeling of sameness or similarity with them. A study of 1545 British participants found that they had more willingness to help and a lower perceived threat from Ukrainian refugees than they did Yemeni refugees because of cultural distance, the measure of dissimilarity between two cultures, showing that cultural distance has a negative impact on perceptions toward refugees (Sinclair et al. 2023). Some researchers have also found that “prosocial disposition” and shared European identity are factors that increased willingness to help Ukrainian refugees (Politi et al. 2023). According to Kapetanovic (2022), “sameness” in terms of “whiteness” and Christendom is the reason Ukrainians are depicted more positively by the media and treated more welcomingly (Kapetanovic 2022). Another study used Integrated Threat Theory of Prejudice as a lens to understand more positive perceptions towards Ukrainian than Afghan refugees among Europeans. They found that negative attitudes towards Afghan refugees were higher because of realistic threat (fear of terrorism), symbolic threat (different religion), and intergroup anxiety (discomfort with social and cultural dissimilarities) (Iordache and Blanchard 2024).

In addition, Sajjad (2022) argued that, much like they did in the Cold War, the United States has been much more welcoming to the Ukrainians because of the threat that Russia poses to the world order, and to show solidarity with Ukraine. Another study showed that countries who faced direct aggression from the USSR during the Cold War were more willing to help Ukrainian refugees due to a sense of solidarity based on a past shared experience of the Iron Curtain (Xi 2023). Chu (2020) argues that states have an interest in showing greater hospitality to refugees of a rivaling state because it can delegitimize the rival. Progressing from this line of thought, it can also be expected that Americans who have unfavorable or negative attitudes towards Russia and towards President Vladimir Putin might be more willing to help and support Ukrainian refugees. As a result, the following research questions are considered:

RQ1: How favorable or unfavorable do Americans feel towards Russia?

RQ2: How favorable or unfavorable do Americans feel towards Putin?

RQ3: To what extent do Americans’ attitudes towards Russia predict their willingness to help Ukrainian refugees?

RQ4: To what extent do Americans’ attitudes towards Putin predict their willingness to help Ukrainian refugees?

2. Method

2.1. Participants and Procedures

The data were collected among Americans living in the United States of America through an online anonymous questionnaire distributed through online social media platforms, through professional networks, and through friends and friends of friends. All institutional and ethical clearances for the study were obtained from the Institutional Review Board of California State University San Marcos before the start of the data collection process. It was made clear on the questionnaire that participation was completely voluntary and anonymous, and completing the questionnaire took approximately 10 to 15 min maximum. There was no financial compensation or any other type of incentive for participation. The data were collected between April and October of 2024. It is worth mentioning that these data were collected shortly before the 2024 presidential election, which was won by President Donald J. Trump, whose administration has been generally less hospitable to Ukrainian refugees than the previous administration (Garsd 2026). This could have implications for the salience of political orientation and the general intensity of political attitudes; in our survey pool, most (53 participants or 26.6%) ranked themselves five out of ten, with the rest being somewhat normally distributed, but somewhat skewed towards left. After the data collection, the data were transferred into the statistical software SPSS 29.0 for analysis. A total of 201 individuals participated in the study. Participants’ age ranged from 17 to 78 (M = 26.76), and all participants in the study identified as American citizens.

Out of the 201 participants, 92 (45.8%) were men, while 109 (54.2%) were women. In total, 116 (57.7%) were employed, 65 (32.3%) were students, seven (3.5%) were retired, eight (4%) identified as unemployed, and three (1.5%) identified with “other” employment status. A total of 95 (47.3%) participants completed high school, 21 (10.4%) had a bachelor’s degree, 70 (34.8%) had an associate degree, seven (3.5%) had a master’s degree, six (3.0%) had a PhD, and two (1%) had gone through vocational training. In addition, 91 (45.3%) participants identified as Christian, one (0.5%) as Muslim, 18 (9%) as Agnostic, 12 (6%) as atheist, two (1%) as Buddhist, two (1%) as Jewish, 42 (20.9%) as “nothing in particular”, and 33 (16.4%) as “other” religion.

2.2. Measures

The online survey included demographic measures, a measure of attitudes towards Russia, a measure of attitudes towards President Vladimir Putin, and a measure of the willingness to help Ukrainian refugees. The measures on attitudes towards Russia and attitudes towards President Vladimir Putin were single-item measures adapted from the feeling thermometer (see Haddock et al. 1993; Meleady et al. 2017).

2.3. Attitudes Towards Russia

To measure Americans’ attitudes/feelings towards Russia, a modified version of the feeling thermometer was used (see, Haddock et al. 1993; Meleady et al. 2017). Participants were asked to indicate how cold (unfavorable) or warm (favorable) they felt towards Russia on a scale of 1 to 10 instead of 0° to 100° in the original scale. This scale was reverse-scored so that higher scores meant more negative/unfavorable attitudes/feelings towards Russia and lower scores meant less negative/unfavorable attitudes/feelings towards Russia. The feeling thermometer has been extensively utilized to study attitudes and feelings in previous studies (see Nshom 2022, 2023, 2024).

2.4. Attitudes Towards President Vladimir Putin

To measure Americans’ attitudes and feelings towards President Vladimir Putin, a modified version of the feeling thermometer was used (see, Haddock et al. 1993; Meleady et al. 2017). Participants were asked to indicate how cold (unfavorable) or warm (favorable) they felt towards President Vladimir Putin on a scale of 1 to 10. This scale was reverse-scored so that higher scores meant more negative/unfavorable attitudes/feelings towards Putin and lower scores meant less negative/unfavorable attitudes/feelings towards Putin. The feeling thermometer has been extensively utilized to study attitudes and feelings in previous studies (see Nshom 2022, 2023, 2024).

2.5. Willingness to Help Ukrainian Refugees

In order to measure the willingness to help Ukrainian refugees, participants were asked to indicate on a scale of 1 to 5 the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the following statements: (1) I feel a strong motivation to voluntarily support Ukrainian refugees; (2) I have a strong need to support Ukrainian refugees; (3) My willingness to help Ukrainian refugees is very low. Item 3 was reverse-scored. Response options ranged from (1) absolutely disagree to (5) totally agree. All the items in this scale were adapted from the work of (Schindler and Reese 2017), and the scale showed an alpha reliability of 0.90. Higher scores meant a higher willingness to help Ukrainian refugees, while lower scores meant a lower willingness to help them.

3. Results

First, to answer research questions one and two, negative attitudes towards Russia (M = 6.79, SD = 1.90) and Putin (M = 8.23, SD = 1.97) were both high; however, a one-sample t-test revealed that negative attitudes towards Putin was significantly higher than negative attitudes towards Russia: t(199) = 10.49, p < 0.001. See

Table 1. Means, standard deviations, correlations for study variables.

Variable	M	SD	(1)	(2)	(3)
(1) Willingness to help	3.33	0.97	-	-	-
(2) Attitudes towards Putin	8.25	1.96	0.31 **	-	-
(3) Attitudes towards Russia	6.79	1.90	0.14	0.45 **	-

Note: ** p < 0.001.

below for means, standard deviations, and correlations of all study variables.

To answer research questions three and four, a multiple hierarchical regression with two models was computed with the willingness to help Ukrainian refugees as the dependent variable in both models. Previous research on the role of age, sex (1 = male, 2 = female), level of education, and political orientation (1 = extremely left-wing to 10 = extremely right-wing) on the willingness to help refugees is still unclear. As a result, in the first model of the hierarchical regression, the potential effect of age, sex, education, and political orientation on the willingness to help Ukrainian refugees was controlled for. In the second model of the hierarchical regression, negative attitudes towards Russia and Putin were included.

Model 1 significantly predicted the willingness to help Ukrainian refugees (F = 9.88, p < 0.001, R² = 0.17). Moreover, age (b = −0.01, p = 0.86) and level of education (b = 0.12, p < 0.13) were not significant predictors of the willingness to help Ukrainian refugees. However, sex (b = −0.30, p < 0.001) and political orientation (b = −0.27, p < 0.001) were shown to have significant effects. When negative attitudes towards Putin and Russia were added in model 2 of the hierarchical regression, the results indicated that negative attitudes towards Putin (b = 0.24, p < 0.01) were a significant positive predictor of the willingness to help Ukrainian refugees but negative attitudes towards Russia were not (b = 0.03, p = 0.73). In addition, the analysis also revealed that model 2 was a significant improvement on model 1 (ΔF = 6.63.41, p < 0.001, R² = 0.23). The complete full results of the hierarchical regression can be found in

Table 2. Negative attitudes towards Putin and Russia predicting Americans’ willingness to help Ukrainian refugees.

	Model 1			Model 2
Variable	b	SE	t	b	SE	t
Intercept		0.38	7.25		0.91	4.91
Age	−0.01	0.01	−1.18
Education	0.12	0.05	1.53
Sex	0.30 **	0.13	4.31
Political orientation	−0.27 **	0.03	−4.03
Attitudes towards Putin				0.24 *	0.04	3.09
Attitudes towards Russia				0.03	0.04	0.34
F	9.88 **			9.18 **
R2	0.17			0.23
R2adj	0.15			0.20

Note: ** p < 0.001; * p < 0.01.

below.

4. Discussion

Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, Ukrainian refugees have been welcomed much more warmly than other refugee groups in Europe and in North America. This study set out to investigate Americans’ willingness to help Ukrainian refugees and the explanatory factors. This study specifically considered negative attitudes towards Russian President Vladimir Putin and negative attitudes towards Russia as predictors of Americans’ willingness to help Ukrainian refugees.

First, this study found that, even though negative attitudes towards Russia and Putin were high, negative attitudes towards Putin were significantly higher than negative attitudes towards Russia. Most likely, many people view Putin as a rogue autocrat who often acts outside the bounds of the interests of the Russian state and Russian people, choosing instead to serve his own personal interests and cultivate his own personal legacy. This calls into question the idea that there is a large-scale “Russophobia,” on the part of the American people, and confirms that attitudes towards Russia and its chief leader are often lumped together in academic discussion (Lieven 2000, p. 26). The finding that negative attitudes towards Putin are high is not surprising, as perceptions towards Putin have become more negative since the start of the conflict. This is an important finding with respect to willingness among Americans to help Ukrainian refugees because historically, and to this day, millions of Ukrainians have familial connections to Russia, or may even identify as having Russian ethnicity (Rapawy 1997; Lucas 2022). If our data alternatively showed that perceptions toward Russia were more negative than those towards Putin, it may suggest a broader prejudice among Americans towards Russian people in general, which could be harmful to those Ukrainian refugees who do have said connections.

In addition, this study found that negative attitudes towards Putin significantly predicted Americans’ willingness to help Ukrainian refugees but not negative attitudes towards Russia. Researchers like Simons (2019) highlight Putin’s highly charismatic personality and celebrity, which gained him infamy in most of the West, but sympathy and admiration in various other cultural publics. It is possible that Putin, being the autocratic agent in charge of Russia’s foreign policy and international relations decisions and the face in front of the camera representing Russia to the world media, has given the world the impression that the Russian people and Russian state are merely at the whim of his desires and choices. This is the correct and much less harmful attribution, as the alternative would manifest in broad-scale American prejudice towards the Russian people. It would be more surprising and concerning if our data showed the alternative case that negative perceptions towards Russia, and not towards Putin, predicted willingness to help Ukrainian refugees, as such negative attitudes could just as easily predict a lack of willingness to help Ukrainian refugees insofar as participants may perceive some similarity between Ukrainians and Russians, and thus hold a similar perception of threat towards both groups. It would be more concerning to find that broad-scale prejudice towards a group of people or a nation is predictive of willingness to help another group. Our findings, however, seem to demonstrate a general American ethos of opposition towards rogue autocracy and unilateral and dictatorial violations of state sovereignty and human rights rather than a vague prejudicial perception of threat towards an entire nation or group. Distinguishing between attitudes towards Putin and Russia is a key and central contribution of this article. To blur that distinction would be to confuse prejudicial attitudes towards a group with opposition to autocratic threats to world peace and global stability. Future research should continue to explicitly acknowledge this distinction when surveying attitudes toward any county and/or its leader.

We already saw from Pew Research that 87% of their participants had “no confidence in Putin’s ability to do the right thing in world affairs,” which was 5 points greater than the 82% that the study showed had negative attitudes towards Putin (Fagan et al., 2023). The problem is that many studies have not made the explicit attempt to distinguish between Russia and its leader when it comes to analyzing perceptions towards them; thus, one of the goals of this study was to show this distinction. Clearly, Americans’ motivation to help and support Ukrainian refugees could be a byproduct of their opposition to or unfavorable attitudes towards Putin. This finding is crucial as it deviates from traditional factors that have been found to predict the willingness to help immigrant or refugee groups. This finding is relevant to the context of this conflict and to understanding relations between Americans and Ukrainian refugees in particular.

We also found a positive correlation between left-wing political orientation and higher willingness to help Ukrainian refugees and a negative correlation between right-wing political orientation and negative attitudes towards Putin. Therefore, the more left-wing a person is, the more likely they are to both have very negative views towards Putin and at the same time be comparatively more willing to help Ukrainian refugees. This not only confirms the main argument of this study, namely that negative attitudes towards Putin will predict willingness to help Ukrainian refugees, but it also follows rationally from other scholarly research which demonstrated a higher likelihood of right-wing people to be more sympathetic to Putin or to have more positive views towards him (Perry et al. 2023; Simons 2019; Hoffeller and Steiner 2024). It could be that right-wing people listen to media that are outside of the mainstream, and that the mainstream media consensus portrays a purely negative message regarding Putin. Scholars like Zollmann (2024), who accuse the “western mainstream media” of “omitting” some of the antecedent to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, might speculate as such, but it would be an interesting subject of further investigation to explore. It should be noted that left-wing people are generally more in favor of immigration, but the fact that this also correlates with more negative attitudes towards Putin is an interesting insight.

The main proposition of this investigation is that the more negatively people see Putin, regardless of their political orientation, the more willing they will be to help Ukrainian refugees, because they are the victims of that radical violation of state sovereignty which is the biggest disruption to the modern world order in decades. It can be assumed that this willingness to help Ukrainian refugees comes from an inherent empathy for them, and of not wanting to lose one’s own state’s sovereignty at the hands of a rogue dictator like Putin. Furthermore, the principal of state sovereignty is a critical one established within the Western-dominated world order and is one which people are willing to stand up for, not only for the sake of high ideals, but through the natural desire for self-preservation.

This study is not without limitations. For one thing, a larger and more diversified sample might have given different results. Although we control for education and find no significant correlation, it must me stated that our data relied largely (about 70%) on undergraduate students, who may not be the best representation of all Americans. This is certainly a legitimate concern for any study involving public opinion, which is why the results of this survey should be taken with caution. Still, this article can and should be taken as a theoretical advancement and thus used to motivate future investigations into similar questions. This study should be looked at as a brief exploratory snapshot of what a particular subset of Americans thought at the time of this study, not as a broad consensus of the general public. Finally, although this data relies primarily on undergraduate students, this in some ways can be considered beneficial to our investigation because undergraduate students may be more likely to be politically engaged and have up-to-date knowledge on current events.

Another limitation of our survey data is that we did not control for race and ethnicity and did not include questions about familial relations to immigrants. Therefore, we do not know if any of the participants had any possible biases from being related to immigrants or Ukrainians in particular. However, the survey required the participants to be American citizens, which would rule out any refugees from participating, and we suspect the proportion of participants with direct personal ties to this conflict to be minor. To further mitigate this concern, it must be stated that we did ask participants in the survey “how many Ukrainian refugees have you met,” to which 165 (82%) responded with none, 11 participants (5.5%) responded with one, 23 (11.4%) responded with “between two and five,” and only two (1%) responded with “between five and ten.”

Finally, the survey did not include questions probing participants about their perceptions towards other refugee groups to compare them with how they perceive Ukrainian refugees; neither did it investigate their willingness to help other refugee groups who are completely removed from the conflict with Ukraine and Russia. This may have been a missed opportunity to replicate previous findings in our study population.

These limitations, however, do not invalidate the value of the data presented here, but represent opportunities for future research. For example, future studies could investigate the extent to which patriotism, along with a belief that “the United States is a leader of the free world”, is related with their negative perceptions towards Putin and willingness to help Ukrainian refugees. In addition, another study could investigate people’s perceptions towards and consumption of mainstream media and the extent to which it is related with distrust of mainstream media and attitudes towards Putin.