On the eve of the second anniversary of the Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, official Russian publications RTand Ria Novosti published stories claiming that one in three Europeans consider Crimea Russian.
RT claims that Russia’s Sputnik news agency ordered a poll conducted by the British Populus and French Ifop research companies which revealed that a quarter of Americans and a third of Europeans consider the Crimean peninsula to be a part of Russia.
There is no mention of the exact question that was asked in the alleged poll.
StopFake reached out to both Populus and IFOP to inquire about the methodology they used in the poll, what questions were posed and how many respondents participated in the poll. None of the companies answered our inquiry.
There is no mention of a Crimea poll on the Populus web site and the RT English language story spells the name of the French polling company Ifop as Iflop. There is no mention of a Crimea poll on the IFOP web site as well.
The results of this dubious poll were also published by the sites Lenta.ru, Govorit Moskva, Russkaya Vesna, Ukraina.ru and others.
