---
title: "Zelenskyy says holding elections during the war would split Ukraine"
description: "Ukraine's president told reporters that a wartime vote would be a tsunami for the country. The call he is answering came from Mykhailo Fedorov, the defence minister he sacked in July, who asks whether Russia should get to decide when Ukrainians next choose their government."
category: "World"
category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/world
author: "Priya Sharma"
published: 2026-08-23T13:38:03.000Z
updated: 2026-08-23T13:38:03.000Z
canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/zelenskyy-says-holding-elections-during-the-war-would-split-ukraine
tags: ["ukraine", "zelenskyy", "elections", "martial-law", "russia"]
---
# Zelenskyy says holding elections during the war would split Ukraine

Ukraine's president told reporters that a wartime vote would be a tsunami for the country. The call he is answering came from Mykhailo Fedorov, the defence minister he sacked in July, who asks whether Russia should get to decide when Ukrainians next choose their government.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rejected holding elections while the war continues, in unusually blunt terms.

"I believe that in a war like this, elections as such are a huge risk," he told reporters at a briefing on Saturday, in comments published on Sunday and [reported by Al Jazeera](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/23/zelenskyy-says-wartime-elections-could-destroy-ukraine). "Elections right now are a tsunami for the country that will split Ukraine."

He went further: "If we want to destroy the country, then we can move in the direction of elections during these times of war."

## Who he is answering

The demand he is responding to comes from inside his own former government.

Mykhailo Fedorov, 35, was Ukraine's defence minister until Zelenskyy dismissed him in July after six months in the job. On Tuesday he posted a nine-minute video on YouTube calling for elections.

His argument is put as a question: "Can Russia actually be entitled to define when Ukrainians can elect their authorities next time? I'm sure it's not."

That is a serious framing rather than a rhetorical one. Ukrainian law bans elections during wartime, and while that war continues at Russia's choosing, the effect is that an invading state determines the timetable of another country's democracy. The ban had gone unchallenged until Fedorov's intervention.

## The two arguments, set out plainly

Neither position here is obviously wrong, and it is worth stating both without loading either.

Against holding a vote: millions of Ukrainians are displaced inside the country and abroad, parts of the territory are occupied and could not vote at all, campaigning requires public gatherings in a country under missile attack, and an electorate divided by a contested campaign is harder to defend with. Zelenskyy's "split the country" is a claim about cohesion under fire.

For holding one: a president whose term has run its course governs on a mandate that is expiring, and every month of postponement extends power that was granted for a fixed period. The longer the war lasts, the longer that continues, and a democracy that indefinitely suspends the mechanism by which it changes its leaders has a problem that does not go away because the reason for it is good.

Zelenskyy is the beneficiary of one answer and Fedorov, recently sacked, is a beneficiary of the other. That does not settle which is right.

## What is not in the record

The report we read does not give the date on which Ukraine's elections were originally due, does not describe the legal instrument beyond the wartime ban, and contains no polling on what Ukrainians themselves want.

It also carries no American or Russian position, which matters because pressure for Ukrainian elections has at various points come from outside the country as well as inside it. We are not going to characterise that pressure without a source in front of us.

We verified this account from a single publication.

## Sources

- [Zelenskyy says wartime elections could 'destroy' Ukraine](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/23/zelenskyy-says-wartime-elections-could-destroy-ukraine)