The Attitudes of Arab Youth towards the Russian-Ukrainian Crisis

Abstract

The current study provides the first investigation on the attitudes of Middle Eastern individuals on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Most prior studies on individuals’ attitudes towards the Russia-Ukraine conflict were conducted on social media data (mostly Twitter, Facebook now known as X). Importantly, most of these studies often using sentimental analyses. One limitation of the use of publicly available data is the lack of testing specific hypotheses. Accordingly, in the current study, a novel survey was developed and used to study which includes questions probed individuals' attitudes including cognitive (awareness and knowledge), emotional (feelings and empathy), and social-behavioural (behaviors and actions) aspects of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Further, demographical data was also collected from all participants (n = 370) including age, gender, country of residence, country of citizenship, academic qualifications, academic specialization, job, and income. In the current study, an extensive number of statistical analyses was conducted, including group comparisons, correlational analyses, factor analyses, and regression analysis. Our results are as follows: factor analyses suggest that the survey includes two different constructs: questions about the war in general and questions supporting Russia. Further, results show that cognitive and socio-behavioural aspects of the scale (but not emotional aspects) are related to many demographical variables, suggesting that the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on Arabic people is more cognitive than emotional, possibly due to geographical distance and cultural differences between the Middle East and Russia/Ukraine. Importantly, our factor analysis shows that there was stronger support for Ukraine than Russia among Arabic people. Our findings have implications for understanding the public opinions of individuals in the Middle East towards the Russia-Ukraine conflict.