MOSCOW, May 24. /TASS/. Head of the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center Valery Fyodorov on Tuesday said Russia is a confident winner in the information war for the minds of its citizens with the West.

"The information war is going down on several boards. Here’s the board called the citizens of the Russian Federation - and it definitely shows a victory," he said at a conference titled New Meanings of New Reality. "The victory was won as soon as in the first three weeks of the special military operation in Ukraine."

"And former Western partners helped us a lot with that," Fyodorov continued. "The decisive contribution was made when the West began to impose sanctions."

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating, which has grown during the special military operation of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, is only a consequence in this case, Fyodorov said. "It's not even about the [Russian President Vladimir Putin's] rating, although it really has grown - 78%-80% of people now approve of Putin's work as president," Fyodorov said. "But this is a consequence as a matter of fact. It was more difficult to shape a Donbass consensus around the difficult and costly decision to start this special operation."

According to VTsIOM, as the pollster is known, the first poll on February 25 showed that about 65% of Russians supported the special operation while about 25% spoke against it. Three weeks later, about 75% were in favor, and about 15% were still against. "That means about 10% of adult Russian citizens, or more than 10 million people, changed their views over the course of three weeks," Fyodorov said. "A few months have elapsed since then. These months were filled with a lot of events, both joyful and tragic. And this ratio has not changed. That is, people have already taken a position, and in order for this position to change, something must happen that is comparable in significance to the decision that was made on February 24."

The global public opinion is different, the executive said.

On February 24 Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a special military operation in response to a request for help by the heads of the Donbass republics. He stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories, but aims to demilitarize and de-Nazify the country.