By
Eli Yokley
February 23, 2022 at 6:00 am ET
As the crisis on Russia’s border with Ukraine intensified over the weekend, a new Morning Consult/Politico survey found voters’ perceptions of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy slightly improved over February. And while voters are divided over his handling of the Ukraine crisis, he’s getting better marks for it than he did for his administration’s handling of its last high-profile foreign policy emergency in Afghanistan.
The survey fielded after a week of last-minute diplomacy between American and European diplomats and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government, but was mostly completed before the Kremlin ordered troops into eastern Ukraine.
While at least half of voters said they’d seen, read or heard at least “some” about the Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach that preceded Moscow’s breach of Ukraine’s border, such as the president’s speech last week warning Russia not to invade Ukraine or Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s alert of Russian plans for an imminent invasion, the salience of those stories was relatively weak: Fewer than 1 in 5 Americans said they’d heard a lot.
At this stage of the crisis, voters are split on Biden’s handling of Ukraine.
The latest Morning Consult/Politico survey was conducted Feb. 19-21, 2022, among a representative sample of 2,005 registered U.S. voters, with an unweighted margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.