New Survey from Human Security Lab Shows Majority of Ukrainians Want to End Travel Ban

Human Security Lab has released toplines from a new survey Ukrainian citizens inside war-torn Ukraine, on the question of whether civilian men should be forced to stay in the country or allowed to flee like other civilians.

The question is especially pertinent as new Russian rocket attacks have killed civilians in the city of Vinnytsia at the time of this writing. Many families have chosen not to flee in order to avoid leaving their adult male loved ones behind.

The Ukrainian government declared martial law on March 8, including a restriction on men 18-60 from leaving the country. The ban has separated families, trapped college students and other non-residents inside Ukraine who had come home for short visits, and also affected the freedom of movement of transgender women.

The survey was funded by the Coles Foundation and carried out as part of an omnibus survey of Ukrainian citizens conducted by a global survey consulting firm, RIWI, who has patented a novel methodology for accessing citizen opinions securely online in dangerous or difficult-to-access environments. According to Kethki Kingaonkar of RIWI, the core principle behind RIWI’s technology, called “random domain intercept technology,” is that “any Web user has a chance of randomly coming upon a RIWI survey or message test.” Surfing online, if a user encounters a dormant website, instead of seeing a “page does not exist” notification or an ad, a RIWI survey is rendered full-site on the page. Human Security Lab embedded a question on the survey asking citizens whether they thought men should be forced to stay, permitted to flee, or had some different opinion than either option. Respondents were also allowed to explain or expound on their answer in their own words.

The survey showed that fewer than half of Ukrainians believe that men should be forced to stay in the country, and of those, open-ended explanations of their answer show many of them qualify that support by suggesting changes in the law. For example, one wrote that if citizens are required to stay, they should be training for mobilization, not sitting at home unemployed, and that this should also extend to women not just men: “Training and training of unmobilized men and women 2-3 hours a week on medical training, military training and actions in critical situations should take place.”

Over half of the population (55.3%) outright opposes the travel ban (28.3%) or has an opinion “different than both options” (27%). Most respondents who chose the “different” option expressed opinions in the comment box in opposition to the ban, or suggested policy reforms. Many took the time to express their own personal experiences of being trapped in the country, at risk of shelling, deprivation and separation from their loved ones.

Human Security Lab is still analyzing the open-ended comments from the surveys, but so far has discovered that Ukrainian citizens give both ethical and practical reasons for wanting to end the ban. Some invoke human rights law and rules on gender equality. Others point out that Ukraine has lots of volunteers and untrained, unwilling, depressed civilians do not make the best fighters, that some men can better support the war by working abroad and paying taxes to the army. A third category of respondents chose neither option and outlined a variety of alternative policy idea. For example, one said, Ukraine could institute a rule that citizens must return to the country upon request, rather than hold them indefinitely in a shooting war.

The survey is the first to capture Ukrainians’ own voices on this important and neglected human rights issue. It is one part of Human Security Lab’s research and policy engagement efforts on Ukraine, including a dedicated research project on the situation of civilian men. This week, the Lab has submitted a policy memorandum to the human rights and humanitarian NGO community on the situation of the martial law and will be working on a full report on the protection of civilian men in armed conflict to be released later this year.