The journal Geopolitics has just published an article that should be of widespread interest. It presents unique survey data from January 2022, just a few weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (Russia’s invasion began, as is widely known, in the spring of 2014). Not only that, it presents data gathered by three different survey firms, and from both sides of the line of control. Did it matter who was calling, and from where, to ask questions of residents? Well, indeed it did.

John O’Loughlin did an enormous amount of work on this paper along with Gwendolyn Sasse, the director of ZOIS. I was happy to contribute to the project where I could, though that was not in matters statistical.

The review process for the paper was thorough, which is a credit to the journal. There were lots of rounds of revisions, as well as other projects pulling us away, but we got there in the end, a typical academic timeline of a publication more than two years after the data was gathered. The paper is available Open Access here.