As senior European leaders gathered in Kyiv for the high-stakes Nordic-Baltic Eight summit over the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky doubled down on his rejection of holding national elections amid ongoing full-scale conflict with Russia, pushing back against a surprise call from his former defense minister to organize a vote. In comments published Sunday that emerged from a Saturday press briefing with international reporters including Agence France-Presse, Zelensky framed wartime elections as an existential danger to Ukrainian national unity at a moment when the country is united around fending off Moscow’s 2022 invasion.
“I believe that in a war like this, elections as such are a huge risk,” Zelensky told reporters. “Elections right now are a tsunami for the country that will split Ukraine. If we want to destroy the country, then we can move in the direction of elections during these times of war.”
The debate over wartime voting comes amid a turbulent summer of domestic political unrest in Ukraine, triggered when Zelensky dismissed popular former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who had built a strong public following as a leading advocate for Ukraine’s dominant drone warfare strategy and a vocal proponent of military reform. Following his ouster, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to call for his reinstatement, and Fedorov launched scathing public attacks on Ukraine’s top military leadership, a conflict that ultimately forced Zelensky to replace his commander-in-chief.
Days ago, Fedorov unexpectedly broke his silence to call for urgent progress on organizing a national election. Though he stopped short of explicitly declaring a challenge to Zelensky’s presidency, the move prompted even some of Fedorov’s own long-time supporters to distance themselves from the proposal. Polling data shows the proposal has little traction among the Ukrainian public: only 15 percent of respondents back holding elections before hostilities come to an end, consistent with the broad national support for the continued suspension of elections under existing martial law regulations.
Political analysts have outlined a cascade of practical and security barriers that would make a free, fair wartime vote all but impossible. Key challenges include facilitating ballot access for millions of Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines, millions of refugees displaced across Europe, and residents living under Russian occupation in illegally annexed territories, as well as mitigating the constant threat of Russian election interference and targeted Russian missile and drone strikes on voting infrastructure.
Despite growing pockets of domestic criticism as the war enters its third year, Zelensky remains the most popular political figure in Ukraine. Over the weekend, Fedorov’s team confirmed to AFP that the former minister plans to travel to the United States in the near future, a trip that has already reignited public speculation that he is laying the groundwork for a potential 2025 presidential challenge against the incumbent.
Alongside navigating domestic political pressure, Zelensky used the weekend’s Nordic-Baltic summit to shore up critical international military support. Following one-on-one talks with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, Zelensky announced a new bilateral drone agreement that will deepen defense industrial cooperation between Kyiv and Oslo. Store also used the summit to announce that Norway has pledged $9 billion in military and economic support for Ukraine for 2025, one of the largest single-country annual commitments from any European ally to date.
On Monday, Ukraine’s Independence Day, participating leaders will convene formal working talks focused on building new international pressure on Russia to end its invasion and addressing Ukraine’s increasingly urgent military gaps. The most pressing of these gaps is a critical shortage of interceptor missiles for Ukraine’s U.S.-supplied Patriot air defense systems, which are the primary defense against Russia’s growing campaign of hard-to-intercept ballistic missile strikes across Ukrainian population centers.
Zelensky confirmed over the weekend that deliveries of these critical Patriot interceptors have dropped by half since 2023. The United States is currently facing its own supply chain shortages of the missiles amid rising tensions with Iran, and has so far declined to approve large-scale new transfers to Kyiv. The intensification of Russian strikes has pushed civilian casualty rates to their highest level since the opening months of the 2022 invasion, according to recently updated verified data from the United Nations.
Ukraine has responded to the stepped-up Russian attacks by accelerating its own long-range strike campaign targeting Russian energy infrastructure, military logistics hubs, and supply depots deep behind Russian lines. Over the weekend, Ukrainian forces struck a warehouse belonging to major Russian e-commerce company Ozon for the second consecutive day, marking the latest in a series of sustained attacks on Russian commercial and military supply networks.