Ukraine is “ready for elections,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said, after US President Donald Trump repeated claims that kyiv was “using war” to avoid holding them.
Zelensky’s five-year term as president was due to end in May 2024, but elections have been suspended in Ukraine since martial law was declared following Russia’s invasion.
Speaking to reporters following Trump’s comments in an interview on Politico, Zelensky said he would call for proposals to be drawn up that could change the law.
The election could be held in the next 60 to 90 days if the security of the vote was guaranteed with the help of the United States and other allies, he said.
“I am asking now, and I say this openly, that the United States help me, perhaps together with our European colleagues, to ensure the security of the elections,” he told reporters.
“I believe that the issue of elections in Ukraine depends first of all on our people, and it is a question of the people of Ukraine, not the people of other countries. With all due respect to our partners,” Zelensky said.
“I’ve heard insinuations that we’re clinging to power, or that I’m personally clinging to the presidency” and “that’s why the war doesn’t end,” which he called “frankly, a completely unreasonable narrative.”
Zelensky won the 2019 election with more than 73% of the vote.
Russia has consistently asserted that Zelensky is an illegitimate leader and demanded new elections as a condition for a ceasefire agreement, a talking point that Trump has repeated.
“They talk about democracy, but there comes a point where it’s no longer democracy,” the US president told Politico. He has suggested, without evidence, that Zelensky is the main obstacle to peace as US-led efforts to negotiate a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine continue.
There are significant practical obstacles to a wartime election.
Soldiers serving on the front lines may not be able to vote or may need permission to do so. According to the UN, around 5.7 million Ukrainians live abroad because of the conflict. And any vote would require additional and complex security measures.
Such a vote would only be fair if all Ukrainians could participate, including soldiers fighting on the front lines, a Ukrainian opposition MP told the BBC.
“For these elections to be fair, it is necessary that all the people of Ukraine be allowed to vote,” Lesia Vasylenko told the BBC World Service’s Newsday programme.
He said that “elections are never possible in times of war”, alluding to the suspension of elections in the United Kingdom during World War II.
Discussions about holding elections have been in the news since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
There is little domestic political pressure on Zelensky to call elections while the conflict continues, said Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of the foreign policy committee of Ukraine’s parliament.
There was a “strong consensus” among politicians and civil organizations that the elections would not be held under martial law, the Servant of the People MP told the BBC.
“There is absolutely no possibility of holding elections,” he said. “Even the opposition, which is against Zelensky and would like to see him removed, is against the elections, because they understand the danger of trying to hold elections during war.”
The idea was “exactly what Putin would want,” Merezhko added. “An election campaign would be divisive. Having failed to destroy us from the outside, Putin wants to destroy us from the inside, using elections as another tool to do so.”
A survey conducted in March by the kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) found that around 78% of people opposed holding elections after a ceasefire with security guarantees, and were of the opinion that they could only be held after a full agreement.
The proportion fell to 63% in a September poll, while 22% said elections could be held after a ceasefire with security guarantees, a jump from 9% in March.
“Even a year ago, Zelensky said he was ready for elections as soon as conditions allowed,” in the face of previous pressure, Hanna Shelest, a foreign policy analyst at the Ukrainian think tank Prism, told the BBC.
However, the question was how to create the conditions Zelensky described, Shelest told the BBC World Service’s Newsroom programme, given the number of soldiers and refugees who would vote, as well as the unsafe areas of the country and the ongoing attacks.
“The security of the polling stations cannot be guaranteed,” he said.
Zelensky also faces continued and growing pressure from Trump to agree to a peace deal to end the war, with the US leader urging Zelensky to “play ball” by ceding territory to Moscow.
