{"id":33099,"date":"2026-08-25T10:12:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T10:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/33099\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T10:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T10:12:09","slug":"safe-elections-may-not-be-possible-for-ukraine-but-zelensky-could-still-do-something","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/33099\/","title":{"rendered":"Safe elections may not be possible for Ukraine, but Zelensky could still do something"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham, left, shakes hands with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Monday.WPA Pool\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Michael Bociurkiw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and founder of the World Briefing report<\/a> on Substack.<\/p>\n

On Monday, the 35th anniversary of Ukrainian independence, President Volodymyr Zelensky was handed a gift. Andy Burnham, visiting Kyiv for his first foreign trip<\/a> as British Prime Minister to co-chair a meeting of the Coalition of the Willing, announced that London would allow the defence company MBDA to declassify information<\/a> on the British-made components for the long-range SCALP missile. <\/p>\n

Kyivans got something else out of it, too: nights of relative calm from Russian ballistic missiles and drones, courtesy of that high-level company.<\/p>\n

The pomp also helped bury, at least for a day, a domestic crisis. A week earlier, ousted defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov broke a national taboo by calling for elections,<\/a> which are prohibited under martial law. The day after that, Mr. Zelensky dismissed Iryna Mudra<\/a>, the deputy head of his office, amid allegations of money laundering among top officials.<\/p>\n

Doug Saunders: Ukrainians see a different Zelensky \u2013 one who needs to be reformed<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the weekend, Mr. Zelensky told journalists that an election now would be a divisive \u201ctsunami.\u201d<\/a> But with the war forecast to grind on for years, how long can a wartime president defer the issue?<\/p>\n

Last December \u2013 under pressure from Donald Trump \u2013 Mr. Zelensky said Ukrainians could go to the polls within 60 to 90 days<\/a>. He even asked lawmakers to prepare legislative proposals on how to make elections possible. But eight months on, there is still no draft law.<\/p>\n

Sixty days was always fantasy. Olha Aivazovska, chair of the board of the civil network OPORA<\/a>, told me Ukraine needs at least six to 12 months after the active phase of the war ends, and that the money just isn\u2019t there. \u201cWe do not have the funds, even within the defence budget,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But the public mood on elections appears to be shifting. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology<\/a> found that 57 per cent now say a vote should wait until the fighting stops, down from 69 per cent in March. <\/p>\n

In 2012, I was part of the core team of the largest-ever delegation of long- and short-term Canadian election observers deployed to oversee Ukraine\u2019s<\/a> parliamentary elections that year. I later served as an observer and spokesperson for the OSCE\u2019s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine. Those postings showed me the ways in which monitoring an election there was a logistical nightmare.<\/p>\n

Opinion: The wars in Iran and Ukraine converged years ago<\/a><\/p>\n

Michael Bociurkiw: The question facing Ukrainians in Canada and abroad: Should they stay or should they go?<\/a><\/p>\n

Start with the voters. How does a soldier in a trench cast a secret ballot, and who carries it back to be counted? How do eligible voters in the occupied oblasts vote at all? Ukraine\u2019s embassies and consulates, including in Canada, have been woefully under-resourced for years; they could not begin to process the votes of the millions displaced abroad. Polling stations would themselves become Russian targets. And every stage of it would unfold amid a Russian disinformation and manipulation campaign built for exactly this kind of opportunity.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving elections during wartime is risky,\u201d Daria Kaleniuk of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre told CNN recently<\/a>. \u201cBut more risky for us is having a president and authorities who are not accountable to the people.\u201d Only one politician, she argued, is campaigning: Mr. Zelensky, who she said was sanctioning opponents by decree, and making appointments to law-enforcement leadership that aren\u2019t about guarding the rule of law, but shielding an allegedly corrupt inner circle.<\/p>\n

Canada and Kyiv\u2019s other partners should stop treating \u201cno vote until peace\u201d as the end of the conversation. Here is something Ottawa could do tomorrow, at a cost of tens of millions rather than billions: fund the rehabilitation of Ukraine\u2019s independent media. At least 337 outlets have closed since 2022, and the freeze on U.S. foreign aid gutted much of what survived. Ukrainian investigative reporters have done yeoman\u2019s work exposing corruption at the very top; a strong press is the check on an unaccountable executive now and the precondition for a credible campaign later. Reporters Without Borders<\/a> puts the sector\u2019s needs at US$96-million over three years. <\/p>\n

There is also something Mr. Zelensky<\/a> could do himself \u2013 and it is a pity he didn\u2019t do it when he responded to Mr. Fedorov on Saturday. I covered his 2019 campaign, when he pledged to serve a single term; he set that promise aside a year later. He could pick that line back up, to say that he would not run again and would serve as a caretaker wartime president. A declared lame duck negotiates from a weaker position and invites jockeying behind his back, but it could help drain the legitimacy argument.<\/p>\n

Mr. Zelensky was handed a gift on Monday. The one he could give his own people costs nothing, and requires no one\u2019s permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham, left, shakes hands with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33100,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3756],"class_list":["post-33099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-pleasemod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}