Measuring public opinion where it is hardest to measure
ExtremeScan is an independent research group studying how societies on both sides of the war in Ukraine perceive its meaning, its costs, and the prospects for peace.
Founded in 2022, ExtremeScan was built to answer a difficult question: what do people in Russia and Ukraine actually think during a war that makes honest answers risky? We treat that difficulty as a research problem in its own right — studying reachability, respondent cooperation, and the social pressures that shape what people are willing to say.
Our work combines telephone and online surveys with qualitative focus groups, fielded in both countries and often in collaboration with academic partners. Every release rests on a documented methodology and published question wording, so readers can see exactly what was asked.
CATI telephone surveys, face-to-face interviewing and online panels — designed to reach respondents that wartime conditions tend to silence.
Focus groups, in-depth interviews and expert interviews — the motivation, emotion and social context behind the numbers.
Systematic analysis of media, documents and communication content — combining manual coding with AI-assisted methods.
Monitoring of social media conversations, public sentiment, emerging trends and online communities.
Several of our analysts and field researchers work from inside Russia and Belarus, where naming them would put them at risk. They publish under pseudonyms — their safety comes before attribution.
The partner projects, academic institutions and research teams we work with. We are revising how we name them publicly — since some of our authors have been designated “foreign agents,” public attribution can carry risk. Each will be listed here once agreed.
Our findings are verifiable
We publish anonymised datasets and questionnaires on GitHub so that journalists and researchers can check our work and reuse it. Methodology — including reachability and respondent cooperation — is documented in our post-releases.
On the “foreign agent” label
Some of our authors have been designated “foreign agents” by the Russian authorities. Their materials carry the mandated notice in accordance with that status — and with each author’s own posture toward a label imposed to discredit independent research.
The notice appears above the text of those materials, so it travels with the content when shared and protects readers who repost the work. It does not change what we publish, or how.
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