Fewer Americans see Russian Military as ‘critical threat’ to US

Gallup polled this week to estimate how Americans react to the Russian military. Do they see them as a threat or indifferent to them? It all began on Tuesday with the story of how the US had to shoot down the drone after it crashed with a Russian plane over the Black Sea. That issue led to conducting this poll, and the results will make you shook.

It’s been a year since Russia’s protracted war with Ukraine. It reached its one-year milestone late last month. Fewer Americans now consider Russia’s military power a “serious threat” to the United States.

According to a recent Gallup poll published this week, only 51% of Americans now see the Russian military as a “serious threat,” down from 59% in the weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

The percentage of Americans who considered the Russian military “a significant but not critical threat” increased slightly from 35% to 37%, while the percentage who believed it to be “not at all essential” increased by double from 6% to 12%. Just 1% of respondents said they were undecided.

Just 9% of Americans have a very good or mostly favorable opinion of Russia, while 90% have an extremely negative or mainly negative opinion of the country. Just 1% of those surveyed were undecided.

Along with North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, Russia stands as the other nation with a favorability rating in the single digits, with a 9% favorable rating.

Russian military incompetence in dealing with the Ukrainian military during the initial invasion of Ukraine is probably one of the factors contributing to Americans’ weakened perception of Russia’s military power.

Military experts were perplexed by the Russian military’s apparent inability to maneuver with sufficient coherence and maintain supply lines during its attempt to conquer the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv in the early weeks of the invasion.

In the end, Russia concentrated its military efforts on the Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk and the southern districts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, withdrawing from the area around Kyiv and the northeastern parts of the country.

This poll has given us an idea of how Americans now estimate the Russian military’s power and how they no longer feel intimidated by them.