Are Russians Already Souring on Trump?

With President Trump now officially back in the White House and talk of efforts to end the conflict in Ukraine back in the news, this week we thought we’d ask Talisman (FilterLabs’ data platform) a simple question: 

How are Russians in regions bordering Ukraine feeling about Trump?

After a brief inauguration-related uptick, sentiment around Trump in Russia has been trending steadily downward. (For more on the spike at the time of the election and the dip around New Years, see our previous newsletter.) Sentiment in regions along Russia’s border with Ukraine has been lower than sentiment in the country as a whole for months. 

There is obviously a lot that could be contributing to this decline, but here are three things that Talisman tells us about how Russians are feeling about Trump:

• Trump’s threats of sanctions and tariffs were met with dismissal and defiance in Russia’s border regions. In the words of one representative op-ed writer: [The] United States has nothing left to put pressure on Russia with. Biden [...] wanted to smear us, but he didn't have the strength. With Trump ascending the throne, the States have not gained anything. Inflate your cheeks, blow away — there will be no more shells.
  
• Across Russia, and near the border in particular, the press and social media users scoffed at Trump’s promise of a “100-day peace plan” for Ukraine. How could Russia be expected to talk peace when the Ukrainians were bombing them?
• How Trump’s presidency might impact the war with Ukraine was a key driver in the downward trend in recent weeks—and was an especially dominant narrative in the regions along the border.

We used Talisman to explore that third point further. As we looked at many of the individual artifacts, we found that Ukrainian mass drone attacks in Belgorod and Kursk (two oblasts along the Russia-Ukraine border) garnered extensive unfavorable attention towards Trump. In the borderland discourse, we found that coverage of Trump was significantly more likely to mention the attacks and the war, and less likely to discuss other Trump-related topics (e.g., Trump’s Panama- and Canada-related aspirations), than in Russia as a whole.

Clearly, the war is top of mind. One artifact from a Belgorod-based Telegram channel declared: There will be no peace agreement in the near future... The Ukrainian Armed Forces have just attacked Ryazan – local residents are reporting explosions over the city.

A good reminder that the local can always trump the global.

Explore the Data in Talisman

Have questions of your own? Want more hyper-local insights into hard-to-reach places (like Kursk and Belgorod) around the world? Check out the live data on our platform, Talisman! Subscribers with full platform access can investigate the charts above and the individual artifacts underlying them, and so much more.

If you don’t have a Talisman account yet, sign up now – a basic subscription is free!