Fedorov Brings the Wartime Election Debate into the Open

Mykhailo Fedorov has crossed a political line from which there is no easy return. In a nine-minute address on Aug. 18, the former defense minister described a “systemic crisis of governance,” denounced corruption and called on Ukraine to find a “legal, safe and realistic mechanism” for holding elections during a prolonged war.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” he said. “We must not let [Russia President Vladimir] Putin decide when Ukrainians can choose their government.” For years, this argument came mainly from outside Ukraine. In Washington, it was promoted most persistently by leading Republican figures – from the late Sen. Lindsey Graham to US President Donald Trump and several Republican senators who supported Trump’s pressure on Kyiv. Fedorov has now brought that argument home, and he’s not alone in propounding it. From Zelensky’s digital architect to political challenger Fedorov was one of the people who helped make Zelensky president, running the social-media operation behind his 2019 campaign. Aged 28, he became the youngest minister in Ukrainian history and built his reputation around Diia and the promise of a “state in a smartphone.” After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, he became one of Ukraine’s earliest and most persistent advocates of drone warfare, helped secure Starlink access through his communication with SpaceX head Elon Musk and promoted the Army of Drones and Brave1 defense-technology cluster. When he became defense minister in January 2026, he promised to impose data-driven management on one of the country’s largest, most opaque and most expensive institutions. Other Topics of Interest Will Fedorov Meet Trump in the US? | Bohdan Nahaylo TVP World’s Sascha Fahrbach and Kyiv Post’s Chief Editor, Bohdan Nahaylo, discuss Russia’s latest attacks on Kyiv and growing political tensions in the capital. His six-month tenure did not solve everything. The promised overhaul of mobilization did not arrive quickly enough, and service-members who volunteered at the beginning of the invasion continued to complain about unequal conditions and the absence of a clear route out of indefinite service. Yet, Fedorov’s dismissal exposed a wider struggle over military strategy, procurement, political loyalty and the balance between technological warfare and a more traditional command culture. His public clash with then-Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky triggered protests in Kyiv and other cities. Zelensky later removed Syrsky but refused to return Fedorov to the Defense Ministry. Parliament has now confirmed Yevhen Khmara as defense minister. He won 312 votes and has pledged to preserve the core of Fedorov’s team, although questions remain over whether Fedorov’s unfinished procurement reforms will survive. Fedorov released his election address only after it became clear that Khmara would receive the permanent appointment. He had spent a month thanking protesters but largely avoiding a direct public intervention. Then he moved from demanding his job back to questioning the political system itself. A Republican demand comes home The Republican pressure on Ukraine to hold elections began before the 2024 presidential campaign. During a visit to Kyiv in August 2023, the late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham urged Ukraine to hold elections in 2024 despite the war. He later called such a vote an act of defiance against Russia and “a bold and consequential decision”. The argument was voiced in multiple Republican-adjacent interviews, which presented elections as necessary to preserve Ukraine’s democratic image among Americans who did not understand its legal and security reality and increasingly viewed the Russia-Ukraine standoff as a conflict between two corrupt, undemocratic states. It became far more aggressive after Trump returned to the White House. In February 2025, he called Zelensky a “dictator without elections,” falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war and suggested that its president was prolonging the conflict to keep American assistance flowing. Several Republicans rejected Trump’s claim that Ukraine had started the invasion and declined to call Zelensky a dictator. But Republican senators including Josh Hawley and Graham still backed the demand for elections. In March 2025, members of Trump’s circle reportedly discussed the possibility of a rapid presidential vote with representatives of Petro Poroshenko and Yuliia Tymoshenko, although both Ukrainian opposition leaders rejected elections before peace. Fedorov’s pre-existing rapport with figures in Trump’s orbit, most notably Musk, therefore helps explain why his intervention may resonate in Republican circles. Kuleba warns of institutional decay Former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba’s intervention makes the debate harder to dismiss as a Fedorov maneuver alone. In his new interview, he told Novyny.Live that Ukraine needs presidential and parliamentary elections because political systems, even when led by decent people, eventually exhaust themselves and begin to decline. “There comes a moment when the system begins to degrade,” he said, arguing that such degradation would weaken the institutional framework on which Ukraine’s resistance depends. In Kuleba’s preferred scenario, Zelensky would be re-elected, while a new parliamentary coalition would replace the Servant of the People mono-majority. The presidential party could remain one participant, but it would no longer govern alone. That, he argued, would restore a constitutional balance in which parliament and the president again performed their proper functions. Kuleba also believes a wartime campaign could be structured, certain subjects placed outside political competition and elites persuaded to guide the country calmly through an institutional reset. After the war, he warned, accumulated anger and demands for revenge could make an election even more destructive. Zaluzhny matters too In a SOCIS poll conducted from July 28 to Aug. 2, Fedorov placed third in a hypothetical first round with 13.1%, behind Zelensky at 22.3% and former Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny at 21.4%. In simulated runoffs, Fedorov defeated Zelensky by 63.8% to 36.2%, while Zaluzhny won by 66.2% to 33.8%. Fedorov is not the only one eyeing a potential election. Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief Zaluzhny, now the country’s ambassador to the UK, has been the most obvious potential challenger to Zelensky since his dismissal in February 2024. Zaluzhny’s popularity was built during the most dangerous period of the full-scale invasion. The Armed Forces of Ukraine under his command defended Kyiv and northern Ukraine and later conducted the successful counteroffensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions. He became one of the few Ukrainian public figures whose legitimacy did not depend on Zelensky or a party machine. His dismissal followed months of tension with the president over military strategy, mobilization and the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive to produce the expected breakthrough. Moving Zaluzhny to London removed him from the military chain of command, but not from Ukrainian politics. Zaluzhny has still not formally announced his intention to run. He previously denied reports that he was assembling a campaign headquarters while the war continued. Yet Ukrainska Pravda reported in July that, when asked by Zelensky whether he would participate if an election were announced, Zaluzhny said that he would. According to the report, he explained that he had never sought a political career but could not simply disregard the trust placed in him. Unlike Fedorov, Zaluzhny has not publicly demanded wartime elections or directly challenged the president. Instead, he has largely confined his public interventions to military and strategic questions, including Ukraine’s battlefield adaptation and NATO’s outdated approach to modern warfare. The case for a political reset Zelensky remains Ukraine’s legitimate president. Article 108 of the Constitution states that the president continues exercising his powers until a newly elected successor takes office. The postponement of elections under martial law is therefore not a coup or a legal trick, despite years of Russian propaganda and Trump’s rhetoric. Ukraine’s election watchdog OPORA has explained the constitutional continuity clearly. Legal legitimacy, however, does not equal political vitality or representation, particularly when soldiers, veterans, volunteers, mayors, engineers and civil-society leaders who now carry much of the state have no realistic route into national government without elections. This is all the more problematic given that Ukraine’s EU reform path is currently in jeopardy. Kyiv Post has repeatedly reported on sluggish reforms and concerns voiced by opinion leaders, including Mykhailo Zhernakov of the DEJURE Foundation, who wrote that an EU diplomat had asked him why “they need all these money bags and crypto accounts if there’s no country left?” Worse still, several recent corruption scandals have implicated not only Zelensky-adjacent figures such as Andriy Yermak, but also Ukraine’s now-resigned ambassador to the US, Olha Stefanishyna, and, most recently, Iryna Mudra. The obstacles are not excuses Under Article 19 of the law on martial law, presidential, parliamentary and local elections are prohibited while martial law remains in force. Changing that framework would be only the beginning. Ukraine would have to find an approach no modern European democracy has faced. More than four million Ukrainians have temporary protection in the EU, millions are internally displaced, around one million serve in the defense forces and millions more live under Russian occupation. Hundreds of Russian missiles and drones strike cities far from the front, while the fighting itself stretches along more than 1,200 kilometers. Reuters has summarized the scale of the security and registration problem. An election also requires candidates to campaign while servicemembers must be able not only to vote but also to run for office without abandoning their units or violating military discipline. While Ukrainians living abroad are the least problematic voting group, people in occupied territory must not be forced to choose between disenfranchisement and exposing themselves to Russian repression. Online voting through the Diia app could be considered in principle, but it would also create extraordinary security and legitimacy risks. A presidential administration cannot credibly ask citizens to trust a secret ballot cast through infrastructure controlled by the executive during a war saturated with Russian cyber operations and disinformation. Olha Aivazovska, head of OPORA, has pointed to an additional irony: neither Zelensky nor Fedorov has done enough to prepare the infrastructure for the election they now discuss. In a Kyiv Post opinion, she wrote that work on post-war election legislation had stalled and that the Defense Ministry under Fedorov had not made voting rights for servicemembers a priority. The public is also more cautious than the political class. A Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey conducted from July 20 to Aug. 3 found that only 15% supported elections before hostilities end. Another 23% would accept them after a ceasefire backed by security guarantees, while 57% wanted to wait for a final peace agreement and the complete end of the war. Given that Russia remains averse to a peace settlement and is reportedly eyeing another round of mobilization, the question is how long Ukrainians are prepared to fight not only the enemy, but also an increasingly corrupt and unaccountable system.