MOSCOW, January 25. /TASS/. According to a recent survey, less than half of Russians (40%) have high hopes for Donald Trump’s presidency, but only four percent believe that he will be a bad president for his country, the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center said in a statement.
"Expectations for Donald Trump’s presidency are high: 40% of our fellow citizens think that he will prove to be a good president of the United States with eight percent believing he will be one of the best. As many as 31% of the respondents say he is rather likely to become an ‘average’ president, while four percent are confident he will be a ‘bad’ or a ‘very bad’ head of state," the statement reads.
At the same time, the poll indicates that most Russians (81%) view the outcome of Barack Obama’s second presidential term negatively, with only nine percent assessing his activities positively (compared to 56% in 2010).
Despite the fact that generally Russians have a positive attitude towards the new US president, more than a half of those polled oppose his offer to lift part of sanctions on Russia in return for a mutual reduction in nuclear weapons (Trump earlier said in an interview with the Times of London and Germany’s Bild that a nuclear deal could be clinched with Russia in connection with talks on easing the West’s sanctions).
Russians are even more critical about the idea to improve bilateral relations with the US by handing over Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence agency employee, to Washington (his temporary residence permit, issued by Russian authorities in 2014, has been recently extended to 2020). As many as 71% of respondents spoke out against this possibility while only 12% upheld it.
The poll was conducted on January 20-22, 2017, among 1,800 people, with a margin of error of 95% certainty, not exceeding 2.5%.