When Volodymyr Zelenskyy last asked Ukrainians to vote for him, he was a political newbie, a former comedian eager to change his country and talk with Russia to end a protracted conflict.
Six years later, Zelenskyy — transformed by the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion — is facing sudden pressure from the United States to hold a new election, even as he navigates Washington’s push for a peace deal that could threaten Ukraine’s future.
President Donald Trump, frustrated by a lack of progress in peace talks, criticized Zelenskyy this week for “using war not to hold an election.” It’s a narrative that Moscow has exploited to label Zelenskyy’s government “illegitimate” and thus impossible to negotiate with.
Yet an election would currently be illegal, since Ukrainian law prohibits holding elections while martial law is in effect.
Nonetheless, Zelenskyy now appears to be playing ball. But huge questions hang over the idea, from security to logistics, given the fierce fighting on the front lines and the daily Russian aerial assaults on Ukraine’s cities.
“I do not want Ukraine to have a weak position, so that someone could use the absence of elections as an argument against Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said Thursday. Elections could happen in 60 to 90 days, he has said, provided that Ukraine’s allies help provide security on the ground.
Ukraine was scheduled to hold a presidential election in early 2024, but it was postponed because martial law was introduced after Russia’s February 2022 attack.
After Trump’s comment, Zelenskyy said he had asked lawmakers to prepare proposals “enabling changes to the legal framework” that would make elections possible.
Beyond martial law, there are two major challenges, Zelenskyy said: security and the army.
First, how would Kyiv ensure that people who come out to vote won’t be hit in a sudden missile or drone strike? The Kremlin’s attacks regularly plunge Ukrainian cities into frigid darkness for hours, which could complicate voting and ballot counting.
“Elections always involve crowds,” said Kyiv-based political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko. “What do you do about air raid alerts and safeguarding electoral paperwork? If a siren goes off, do you just grab a bunch of election protocols and run into a shelter? I am having a hard time imagining how that could work.”
The White House did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment on how the U.S. might help.
Kyiv would also have to figure out how hundreds of thousands of soldiers fighting on the front lines would vote.
Some forces could perhaps be rotated out to vote in relatively safer areas, but Ukraine is already low on manpower and could risk jeopardizing critical battlefield positions.
To that end, Zelenskyy has called for a ceasefire during the election process. The Kremlin swiftly shot down the suggestion, having long rejected any ceasefire before a full peace deal is reached.
Without a pause in fighting, more than 800,000 personnel in Ukraine’s armed forces would be effectively shut out of any election process, said Yevheniia Kravchuk, a lawmaker with Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party. It would be unsafe for people overseeing the voting, too, she said. “I don’t see any observers coming to the front line where you can be killed by a first-person view (FPV) drone like every 15 minutes,” Kravchuk said in an audio message sent to NBC News on WhatsApp.
Kravchuk pointed to the country’s five different presidents since Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia in 2000. “Ukrainians understand that during the war, the first goal is to survive and to keep the country, keep the sovereign state,” she said.
Zelenskyy has been under domestic pressure, too, thanks to a corruption scandal. But even his opponents seemed skeptical of a wartime vote.
It would take at least half a year after the end of martial law to organize elections that would be truly free and fair, said opposition lawmaker Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze. “But discussing all of this right now has little to do with the reality on the ground,” Klympush-Tsintsadze, who represents the European Solidarity Party, said in an audio message on WhatsApp. “We are very far from the real end of this war,” she added.
Another complicating factor is that millions of Ukrainians fled the country when the war broke out and now live overseas. Millions more have been internally displaced by the fighting or now live in areas occupied by Russia (about 20% of Ukraine’s territory), so simply working out who is eligible to vote and how to reach them would pose an immense challenge, said Fesenko.
Trump and Putin may think that the lack of an election undermines Zelenskyy’s legitimacy, but Ukrainians don’t seem to agree.
An opinion poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in September found that 63% of Ukrainians believe elections should be held only after a final peace agreement and a complete end to the war. Only 11% support holding elections right now, even without a ceasefire, according to the poll.
Should an election be held in the near future, there is only one candidate who could challenge Zelenskyy, Fesenko said — Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the former commander in chief.
Zaluzhnyi has remained a popular figure after leading the Ukrainian army through much of the war. He was sacked by Zelenskyy in early 2024 and is now serving as Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain. Although Zelenskyy’s position has been weakened by the corruption scandal, the president would still be a front-runner alongside Zaluzhnyi, Fesenko said. “It’s just these two,” he said. “Everyone else has much lower ratings.”
“In the fourth year of the war, everyone is deeply exhausted,” marketing specialist Ivan Datsko told NBC News on the phone from Kyiv on Wednesday.
Datsko, 33, said he felt that elections could be held but that there must at least be a ceasefire. “No rockets, no [drones] — and conditions that allow our soldiers to rotate safely. And of course, all Ukrainians who have left the country must also have the opportunity to vote,” he said.
“If all these conditions are met, it could become a strong step toward real peace talks,” Datsko added. “First, silence on the front line, then elections, and after that, an agreement that truly protects Ukraine from future aggression and gives us a chance for peace and a normal life,” he said.
Russia has accused Zelenskyy of trying to cling to power. Last month, Putin said signing a peace deal with Zelenskyy would be “pointless” because he has lost his legitimacy after being too “afraid” to run again. The Kremlin said Friday that Zelenskyy’s declared readiness for an election may simply be his latest attempt to freeze the conflict before negotiating a deeper peace deal — something Moscow has frequently rejected.
Other countries have held elections in wartime and elected officials’ democratic mandate becomes weaker the longer they are postponed, but elections also need to be practically possible, said Janina Dill, an international law expert on the use of force and a professor of global security at the University of Oxford.
“And calls for an election must not be used to weaken Ukrainian agency and resolve in the midst of an existential struggle for national survival,” Dill added.
