Critical Thinking, Political Interest, and Adolescents’ Attitudes Toward Russians and Ukrainians in Wartime

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has confronted European societies with a moralized international conflict in which condemnation, solidarity, and collective blame are simultaneously salient. Wartime contexts pose a fundamental challenge for theories of political socialization. While critical thinking is widely framed as a key democratic competence and political interest as a central motivational orientation toward public affairs, highly moralized conflicts raise the possibility that these resources foster not generalized tolerance, but selective solidarity and moral exclusion of groups associated with perceived aggression. This paper examines how adolescents’ critical thinking and political interest relate to attitudes toward Russians and Ukrainians in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and whether political interest moderates the association between critical thinking and outgroup attitudes. I use data from the first wave of the Czech Education Panel Survey (collected in October 2023, comprising approximately 16,000 high school students (16-17 years old) from 236 schools) and the third wave (collected in October 2025, including students from 230 schools). Respondents completed an online questionnaire and a validated test of critical thinking during the regular school day under supervision. Attitudes toward Russians and Ukrainians were measured using feeling thermometers. Multilevel linear regression models account for the hierarchical structure of students nested within schools and adjust for gender, parental education, and support for immigrants’ rights. Results from Wave 1 indicate that both critical thinking and political interest are positively associated with warmer attitudes toward both groups. However, their joint association differs markedly by target group. For attitudes toward Ukrainians, higher critical thinking is linked to more positive evaluations regardless of political interest, while political interest contributes an additional, largely additive positive shift, producing a broadly pro-solidarity pattern. In contrast, for attitudes toward Russians, political interest substantially moderates the association with critical thinking. Among adolescents with low political interest, higher critical thinking is associated with warmer attitudes toward Russians. Among highly politically interested adolescents, however, higher critical thinking corresponds to markedly colder attitudes toward Russians. These findings suggest that critical thinking does not uniformly translate into generalized tolerance in wartime contexts. When combined with political interest, it appears to support more differentiated and morally coherent evaluations that reinforce solidarity with victimized groups while simultaneously legitimizing moral condemnation of perceived aggressors. This pattern highlights the importance of considering political engagement and conflict framing when assessing the normative implications of democratic competencies during adolescence. Data from Wave 3 (collected in autumn 2025) were not available at the time of writing. However, future analyses will use both waves of the Czech Education Panel Survey to examine if these associations persist or change over time as adolescents’ political attitudes, interest and possibly cognitive skills further develop.