Zelenskyy’s five-year term as president was due to end in May 2024, but elections have been suspended since martial law was declared.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Dec. 9 he was prepared to hold elections within three months if his allies in the West could ensure the vote was secure and fair.
Zelenskyy was responding to an interview U.S. President Donald Trump gave to Politico in which he said it was time for Ukraine to hold an election.
“I think it’s an important time to hold an election,” Trump said.
“They’re using war not to hold an election, but I would think the Ukrainian people should have that choice. And maybe Zelenskyy would win. I don’t know who would win.
“But they haven’t had an election in a long time. You know, they talk about a democracy, but it gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore.”
When Was Zelenskyy Elected?
In 2019, Zelenskyy, a former comedian and actor who was then 41, won 73 percent of the vote in the second round of the presidential election, defeating the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko.
In the popular Ukrainian television show “Servant of the People,” Zelenskyy played a schoolteacher who becomes the Ukrainian president after delivering a speech about government corruption that goes viral online.
Zelenskyy was elected five years after ethnic Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and Crimea broke away from Kyiv in response to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s ousting by pro-EU protesters in February 2014. Yanukovych, who was seen as pro-Russian, fled to Moscow.
That same year, Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, following a referendum that was declared illegal by the government in Kyiv.
In December 2019, Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin met face-to-face in Paris for talks, but the negotiations went nowhere.
Elections Suspended
Zelenskyy’s five-year term as president was due to end in May 2024, but elections have been suspended since martial law was declared, after Russia invaded on Feb. 24, 2022.
Russia held a presidential election in March 2024, in which Putin, then 71, was reelected by a comfortable margin.
Although Russia was at war, unlike Ukraine, it did not have a portion of its territory under enemy occupation.
Currently, elections are forbidden under martial law in Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has said he is willing to try to change the law to allow wartime elections, even in a partly-occupied country.
“I’m ready for elections, and moreover, I ask … that the U.S. help me, maybe together with European colleagues, to ensure the security of an election,” Zelenskyy said on Dec. 9.
“And then in the next 60–90 days, Ukraine will be ready to hold an election.”
A poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that only 25 percent of Ukrainians approved of elections following a cease-fire and security guarantees, and 57 percent believed they should only be held after a final peace agreement was reached. The pollsters questioned 547 people in Ukrainian-controlled territory.
