Ukraine is “ready for elections”, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said, after US President Donald Trump repeated claims 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 after Russia’s invasion.
Speaking to reporters following Trump’s comments in a wide-raging Politico interview, Zelensky said he would ask for proposals to be drawn up which could change the law.
Elections could be held in the next 60 to 90 days if security for the vote was guaranteed with the help of the US and other allies, he said.
“I’m asking now, and I’m stating this openly, for the US to help me, perhaps together with our European colleagues, to ensure security for the elections,” he told reporters.
“The issue of elections in Ukraine, I believe, depends first and foremost on our people, and this is a question for the people of Ukraine, not the people of other countries. With all due respect to our partners,” he said.
“I’ve heard hints that we’re clinging to power, or that I personally am clinging to the presidency” and “that’s why the war isn’t ending”, which he called “frankly, a completely unreasonable narrative”.
Russia has consistently claimed Zelensky is an illegitimate leader and demanded new elections as a condition of a ceasefire deal – a talking point which has been repeated by Trump.
“They talk about a democracy, but it gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore,” the US president told Politico. He has suggested without evidence that Zelensky is the main obstacle to peace as US-led efforts to broker a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine continue.
Such a vote would only be fair if all Ukrainians could participate, including soldiers fighting on the front line, a Ukrainian opposition MP told the BBC.
“In order for these elections to be fair all of the People of Ukraine would need to be allowed to vote,” Lesia Vasylenko told the BBC World Service’s Newsday programme.
She said that “elections are never possible in wartime”, alluding to the suspension of elections in the UK during World War Two.
Discussions around holding elections have made headlines since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They have been routinely dismissed by Ukraine’s government, opposition and public alike, arguing unity in the war effort must come first.
A poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in March found about 78% of people opposed holding elections even after a complete settlement of the war.
“Even a year ago, Zelensky said that he was ready for elections as soon as the conditions allow” in the face of previous pressure, Hanna Shelest, a foreign policy analyst with the think tank Ukrainian Prism, told the BBC.
The question was, however, how to create the conditions Zelensky outlined, Shelest told the Newsroom programme on the BBC World Service, given there were around one million soldiers and four million refugees who would be voting – as well as unsecured areas in the country and ongoing strikes.
“You cannot guarantee the security of the polling stations,” she said.
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