A total of 67 percent of those surveyed say they believe Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is a threat to world peace, a significant increase in one year.
It is Ipsos who conducted the poll on behalf of Dagbladet. 1,000 Norwegians have responded to the survey.
Last summer, 45 percent of those surveyed said in a similar survey that Putin threatened world peace. In December, the same figure had risen to 57 percent.
In the new survey, 67 percent of those polled say they believe Putin and Russia are a real threat to world peace. Of those surveyed, 18 percent say they see Putin as a threat to a very large extent, while 49 percent say they have a similar view of the Russian president. 25 percent of those surveyed said they saw little threat to Putin.
“Putin has been featured and presented as an aggressive authoritarian leader. Those preparations are recycled all the time. That does not mean that I do not think they are right, but they have become very one-sided,” says Russia expert and senior researcher at NUPI, Julie Wilhelmsen, to Dagbladet.
Iver B. Neumann, former NUPI researcher and now director of the NOVA Welfare Research Institute, believes Putin and Russia want to be a great power that is feared and respected
“But they are not financially strong enough. Russia’s economy is very weak and small. It is commodity-based and the countryside is completely underdeveloped. They must find other ways to respect themselves. Rattling with weapons is the easiest,” says Neumann.
© NTB Scanpix / #Norway Today
