Our findings show fairly significant damage to the image of Russia as a country as well as the Russian government; however, the reputational damage of the Russian people is minimal

The reputational cost of military aggression: Evidence from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Peyman Asadzade, Roya Izadi. Research & Politics, May 12, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/20531680221098337

Abstract_ Large-scale military aggression is argued to damage the international image of the aggressor and mobilize global public opinion against it. Previous cross-country research also finds that negative views of the aggressor are usually limited to the government and do not extend to the citizens of the invading country. Our article provides micro-level evidence on attitude change toward Russia as a country, the Russian people, and the Russian government after its invasion of Ukraine. We use data from a survey conducted between the morning of 21 February 2022 (3 days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and the night of 28 February 2022 (5 days after the invasion) in the United States to evaluate how the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected attitudes toward the country, its people, and the government. We also conduct a subgroup analysis to explore the magnitude of attitude change across sociodemographic and political subgroups after the invasion. Our findings show fairly significant damage to the image of Russia as a country as well as the Russian government. However, the reputational damage of the Russian people is minimal. The results also suggest that Republican and religious subgroups had the largest attitude change on Russia and the Russian government.

Keywords: War, public opinion, international image

Conclusions

Our study provides empirical evidence on the reputational cost of military aggression by using survey data that was collected amidst the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Our study offers a nuanced and more complex understanding of war and global public opinion. The findings demonstrate that unjustified military aggression does create negative global public opinion on the aggressor party but the negative attitude is mostly directed at the government and the country. The results show that the ordinary citizens of the aggressor government remain immune to the reputational damage.

While our study offers a nuanced picture of war and international image, several cautions should be noted. First, although our survey started 3 days before the attack, public discussion on the possibility of a Russian attack had already begun a few weeks before the attack. Especially, reports from the United States intelligence agencies on the likelihood of a Russian invasion prompted a wide range of speculations among political pundits as well as the public before the attack. Therefore, attitudes on Russia might have started to harden even before the invasion. Therefore, it is possible that our study underestimates the full magnitude of attitude change.

It is also important to emphasize that our study uses a student sample. While using student samples is a common practice in social science research, it is also argued that they are less externally valid compared to the samples drawn from the general population. We compared our results on unfavorable attitudes toward Russia to those of PEW and Gallup polling conducted in 2020 and 2021, respectively (the graph is reported in the appendix). Overall, our pre-invasion sample shows less negative attitudes toward Russia compared to the PEW and Gallup samples (5% less than PEW and 10% less than Gallup). Given the difference, it is possible that our sample somewhat underestimates negative attitudes toward Russia.

Furthermore, it is critical to highlight that the survey was carried out in the United States. While we have witnessed a fairly large number of rallies in support of Ukraine in Europe and North America (Schwartz, 2022), evidence for broad anti-Russian sentiments in the rest of the world is not quite as strong. It could be due to the difficulty of collective action in authoritarian environments (especially in countries with strong ties to Russia) or because of widespread anti-Western sentiments in a large number of countries in the Global South (Aydin, 2007; Lewis, 1993) where many citizens might perceive the war as a confrontation between Russia and the West. Given the presence of anti-Western sentiments in the Global South for a variety of historical reasons (e.g., colonialism or past interventionist policies), the findings need to be interpreted with caution. While the results may show us the magnitude of negative attitudes toward Russian in the United States or perhaps most of Europe, they do not necessarily travel to the Global South.