ATHENS – While Greece’s government stood solidly behind Ukraine after Russia invaded, the strong pro-Russian sentiment harbored by a large number of Greeks for a fellow Orthodox country – although, so is Ukraine – showed many think the European Union and NATO were being too tough.

A new YouGov poll shows that the majority of Western countries support penalties against Russia but that Greece, along with Hungary and Italy thought it was too much, said the British newspaper The Guardian.

The YouGov-Cambridge globalism project “found strong support for maintaining, and often toughening and expanding, military and economic measures against Moscow,” but it turned out “multiple countries around the world – including some in the West – were markedly more ambivalent, or even sympathetic, towards Russia,” the paper said.

The poll taken from Aug. 24-Sept. 22 found 10 countries backed maintaining economic sanctions on Russia, apart from the three outliers.