September 26, 2008	Friday	Ramazan 25, 1429

MOSCOW, Sept 25: Two-thirds of Russians dislike the United States following last month’s war in Georgia, the country’s highest level of anti-US sentiment in a decade, a Moscow polling agency said on Thursday.

Sixty-seven per cent of respondents said they had “mostly negative” attitudes toward the United States, while only 23 percent had “mostly positive” feelings, the independent Levada Centre said in a statement.

The level of anti-US sentiment was the highest recorded since the centre began polling Russians about their attitudes to the US on a monthly basis in 1997, and it had risen sharply since July, before the war in Georgia.

“Clearly, this is connected to the latest events in the North Caucasus,” the centre said of its poll, which was conducted from Sept 12 to 15 amid the worst chill in Russian-US relations since the Cold War.

The survey also found a sharp increase in negative attitudes towards the European Union as well as record levels of animosity towards Russia’s pro-Western neighbours Georgia and Ukraine.

The EU still came out favourably -— with 45 per cent viewing it positively and 39 negatively — but previous surveys had consistently found overwhelming majorities who approved of the European bloc, the centre said.

The poll found that 53 percent of Russians dislike Ukraine — the first time in six years the country evoked a majority of negative responses, according to the centre — and that a whopping 75 per cent dislike Georgia.

The centre said its poll of 1,600 Russians had a margin of error of three percent.—AFP