Ukraine ‘ready for elections’ if partners guarantee security, Zelensky says
President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine was “ready for elections” after US President Donald Trump claimed that Kiev was “using war” to prevent the elections.
Zelensky’s five-year presidential term was due to end in May 2024, but elections in Ukraine have been postponed since martial law was declared following Russia’s invasion.
He made a wide-ranging speech to journalists after Trump’s statements political interviewZelensky said he would ask for proposals that could change the law to be prepared.
He said elections could be held in the next 60 to 90 days if voting security is guaranteed with the help of the United States and other allies.
“I’m asking now, and I’m making this clear, for the United States to help me, perhaps together with our European counterparts, 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 this is a problem of the Ukrainian people, not the people of other countries. With all due respect to our partners,” he said.
“I’ve heard hints that we’re clinging on to power, or that I’m personally clinging on to the presidency” and “that’s why the war is not ending,” he called it “frankly a completely implausible narrative.”
Russia has consistently claimed that Zelensky is an illegitimate leader and has demanded new elections as a condition of the ceasefire agreement; This was a talking point echoed by Trump.
“They talk about democracy, but it’s getting to the point where it’s not democracy anymore,” the US president told Politico. he suggested Without evidence that Zelensky is the biggest obstacle to peace While US-led efforts to broker a peace agreement to end the war in Ukraine continue.
A Ukrainian opposition lawmaker told the BBC that such a vote would only be fair if all Ukrainians, including soldiers fighting on the front lines, took part.
Speaking to BBC World Service’s Newsday program, Lesia Vasylenko said, “For these elections to be fair, all Ukrainian people must be allowed to vote.”
He said that “elections are never possible in wartime”, referring to the suspension of elections in Britain during the Second World War.
Discussions about holding elections have made headlines since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It was routinely rejected by the Ukrainian government, the opposition, and the public, arguing that unity in the war effort should come first.
A March poll by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) found that even after the war was fully resolved, about 78% of the public opposed holding elections.
“Just a year ago Zelensky said he was ready for elections as soon as conditions allowed,” Hanna Shelest, a foreign policy analyst at the Ukrainian Prism think tank, told the BBC.
But the question, Shelest told the BBC World Service Newsroom programme, was how to create the conditions Zelensky had outlined; Because in addition to approximately one million soldiers and four million refugees who would vote, there were also unsafe areas and ongoing strikes in the country.
“You can’t guarantee the security of polling stations,” he said.
