Putin, Lukashenko and Trump most distrusted world leaders in Poland, Zelensky most trusted

Feb 26, 2026 | Featured, Politics, Society

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni are the three most trusted world leaders in Poland, while Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko and Donald Trump are the most distrusted, according to a new poll by Polish state research agency CBOS.

The pollster presented respondents with a list of 12 prominent foreign leaders and asked if they feel trust, distrust or indifference towards them. They could also choose options to say they are unsure or that they do not know who the person is.

Ukraine’s Zelensky enjoyed the highest level of trust, at 49%, well ahead of France’s Macron (36%), Italy’s Meloni (35%) and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (31%).

However, Zelensky’s figure is down significantly from the last time CBOS conducted the same survey, in summer 2022, when his level of trust stood at 86%. During that time, distrust towards him has risen from 4% to 28%.

In CBOS’s latest findings, the most distrusted leaders were Russia’s Putin (91%) and Belarus’s Lukashenko (86%). Both of their countries have in recent years been carrying out a series of “hybrid actions” against Poland, including sabotage, cyberattacks and engineering a migration crisis on the border.

They were followed by US President Trump, who is distrusted by 56% of Poles and trusted by 25%. By contrast, in the 2022 poll, Joe Biden, the US president at the time, was trusted by 74% and distrusted by 7%.

 

The new findings follow a number of other polls showing negative sentiment towards Trump in Poland, as well as towards the US in general under his leadership.

A report by the Pew Research Center published last year showed that only 35% of Poles had confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, down from a figure of 75% a year earlier for Biden.

Another poll conducted in January this year found that a majority of Poles, 53.2%, believe that the US is no longer a reliable ally of Poland, while only 29.9% believe that it is.

Last month, CBOS also reported that, in its regular polling on how Poles feel about various national and ethnic groups, dislike of Americans had risen by eight percentage points since last year, the joint-highest increase it recorded.

The new CBOS poll also showed strongly negative sentiment towards Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu (who is distrusted by 53% and trusted by 4%) and Hungary’s Viktor Orban (distrusted by 53% and trusted by 18%).

Meanwhile, a majority of Poles (55%) said they did not know who Keir Starmer is, despite him serving as prime minister of the United Kingdom since July 2024.

The next highest figures for unfamiliarity were for Friedrich Merz (37%), who has been German chancellor for less than a year, and Xi Jinping (35%), who has been president of China for well over a decade.


Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: White House (under CC BY 3.0 US)

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