Democracy Under Fire: Why Ukraine Cannot Hold Elections in an Existential War

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Monday 24 August 2026

There is something superficially attractive about the proposition that Ukraine should hold elections in wartime. Ukraine is a democracy. Democracies hold elections. Russia is an autocracy. Therefore, it is said, Ukraine should demonstrate the distinction between herself and her aggressor by proceeding with elections notwithstanding the war. The argument has a pleasing simplicity — and it is almost entirely wrong.

The purpose of elections is not merely to put pieces of paper into ballot boxes. Elections are mechanisms by which political communities make collective choices under conditions of freedom, equality, secrecy, informed debate and reasonable physical security. If those conditions do not exist, an election may retain the outward appearance of democracy while losing much of its substance. Ukraine is presently fighting an existential war against a neighbouring state that seeks not merely concessions from Kyiv but the destruction of Ukraine’s capacity to determine her own political future. Under those circumstances, insisting upon elections irrespective of the conditions in which they would take place risks confusing democracy’s machinery with democracy itself.

The issue has acquired renewed urgency. Former Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has called for wartime elections, arguing that Ukraine faces a crisis of governance. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejected the proposal on 23 August 2026 in unusually stark terms, warning that elections during the present war could divide the country. Recent polling nevertheless suggests that Ukrainian opinion is more nuanced than a simple rejection of democracy: a July–August 2026 survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found 15 per cent favouring elections even before hostilities cease and another 23 per cent prepared to contemplate them following a ceasefire accompanied by security guarantees. A clear majority therefore still does not support elections during active hostilities.

That instinct is constitutionally, practically and strategically sound.

The first problem is the law

Ukraine cannot simply announce an election tomorrow because its existing legal order does not permit one while martial law remains in force. Article 19 of the Law of Ukraine On the Legal Regime of Martial Law expressly prohibits presidential elections, elections to the Verkhovna Rada and elections to local government during martial law. The same law provides for institutional continuity during the emergency.

The Constitution itself makes the position particularly clear in relation to Parliament. Article 83 provides that where the term of the Verkhovna Rada expires during martial law or a state of emergency, its powers continue until the first sitting of the Parliament elected after the emergency has ended. The constitutional order therefore anticipates precisely the situation Ukraine now inhabits. War does not produce a constitutional vacuum. It produces continuity.

The position of the President is sometimes presented more tendentiously. Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s ordinary five-year presidential term arising from his 2019 election has expired. That fact is sometimes transformed — particularly in Russian propaganda — into the assertion that he has therefore become an illegitimate president. Yet Article 108 of the Constitution says something rather different: the President exercises his powers until the newly elected President assumes office. The constitutional mechanism is continuity, not an automatic vacancy upon the fifth anniversary of inauguration.

This distinction matters. Constitutions are designed in part to prevent precisely the catastrophe that would arise if an enemy could manufacture a constitutional crisis merely by making elections impossible. If Russia could deprive the Ukrainian government of legitimacy simply by continuing to bombard Ukraine beyond an electoral deadline, Moscow would acquire a remarkable constitutional weapon: invade a democracy, prevent it from holding normal elections and then announce that its government is illegitimate because elections have not been held.

No sensible democratic constitution can be interpreted to reward aggression in this fashion.

There is then the elementary question of physical security

An election requires polling stations. Polling stations require publicly advertised locations. They require queues of civilians, election officials, observers, police officers and journalists. They require predictable opening hours.

In contemporary Ukraine, those characteristics can also describe a target.

Russian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and long-range drones can strike cities hundreds of kilometres from the front. Air-raid alerts are routine. In frontline regions the danger is vastly greater. Holding thousands of polling stations simultaneously across the country would create an extraordinary security problem. An election authority could hardly guarantee that voters in Kharkiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia or Kherson would enjoy electoral conditions remotely comparable with voters in relatively safer parts of western Ukraine.

Nor does moving voting underground solve the underlying problem. Metro stations and shelters have finite capacity. Many communities lack suitable underground infrastructure. Voting could repeatedly be interrupted by air alerts. Turnout might depend less upon political enthusiasm than upon whether Russia happened to launch missiles against a particular oblast on election day.

That is not equal suffrage.

Indeed Russia would acquire an effective means of manipulating turnout. It would not need to alter a single ballot paper. It could simply bombard areas where polling patterns were expected to favour one candidate, thereby discouraging people from leaving their homes.

The aggressor would become, indirectly, an electoral participant.

Then there are the soldiers

Ukraine has hundreds of thousands of men and women engaged directly or indirectly in national defence. Many are deployed far from their registered homes. Some occupy trenches, bunkers and dispersed positions in which revealing concentrations of personnel would itself create military danger.

These people cannot simply be excluded from an election. They are citizens. Indeed it would be grotesque if those risking their lives to preserve Ukrainian democracy were deprived of the franchise in an election supposedly intended to demonstrate the vitality of that democracy.

But allowing them to vote creates formidable difficulties.

Should polling stations be established near military positions? Doing so risks revealing concentrations of troops. Should soldiers vote electronically? That raises questions of cybersecurity and secrecy. Should ballots be transported to front-line formations? That produces logistical and chain-of-custody problems. Should soldiers be permitted to stand as candidates? If so, must commanders release them from duty to campaign? If not, an enormous and politically significant section of Ukrainian society would be effectively excluded from candidacy.

Military hierarchy creates another difficulty. Elections depend upon freedom from coercion. Armed forces necessarily depend upon command. A soldier must never have reason to suspect that his political preference is known to, or could affect his relationship with, his commanding officer.

These problems are not insoluble in principle. They are extraordinarily difficult to solve in the middle of a high-intensity war.

Then there are the refugees

Millions of Ukrainians have moved abroad since February 2022. They remain Ukrainian citizens and many retain the right to vote. Any credible national election must therefore accommodate an electorate spread across Europe and beyond.

Ukraine’s existing diplomatic network was never designed to operate polling stations for an overseas population of this magnitude. Embassies and consulates could be overwhelmed. Some voters would have to travel hundreds of kilometres. Different host states would impose different practical restrictions. Refugees with money, cars and flexible employment would find voting easier than refugees working long hours, caring for children or living far from Ukrainian diplomatic missions.

A theoretically universal franchise could therefore become profoundly unequal in practice.

Ukraine’s own Ombudsman has identified precisely this problem, stressing that genuinely democratic elections require both security and a real opportunity to vote for internally displaced people, Ukrainians abroad, inhabitants of frontline and temporarily occupied territories and military personnel.

Internally displaced Ukrainians create another problem

Millions of Ukrainians have changed residence within Ukraine. Some remain registered in communities they have not seen for years. Some of those communities have been destroyed. Others are occupied. Addresses have disappeared. Municipal records have been damaged. People have moved repeatedly.

An electoral register is not an administrative detail. It is the foundation upon which equal suffrage depends.

Ukraine would have to determine where displaced citizens vote, particularly in parliamentary and local elections where constituency boundaries matter. Should a refugee from Mariupol living in Lviv vote as a resident of Mariupol or Lviv? What happens when the original constituency is occupied? How are duplicate registrations prevented? How are millions of changes verified without creating bureaucratic obstacles that effectively disenfranchise displaced citizens?

The United Nations’ 2026 country analysis similarly identifies displaced voters, overseas voting, insecure and occupied territories, military participation and polling-station security as central unresolved electoral questions.

The occupied territories present the starkest democratic contradiction

Millions of Ukrainian citizens live in territories under Russian occupation.

They cannot participate freely in Ukrainian political campaigning. They cannot safely display support for Ukrainian candidates. Ukrainian election officials cannot establish polling stations there. Independent observers cannot monitor voting. Ukrainian media cannot operate normally. Candidates cannot campaign.

Yet those citizens have not ceased to be Ukrainians.

Holding a national election without them would therefore mean conducting an election while a significant portion of the national electorate was physically prevented from participating by the foreign power occupying their homes.

That creates a perverse incentive. Territorial conquest would translate into electoral exclusion.

Imagine that political preferences differ geographically — as they invariably do in democracies. A foreign army could then alter the composition of the electorate merely by occupying territory. That would allow military conquest to change the political balance of the country being invaded.

No democracy should accept such a principle casually.

There is also Crimea

Crimea illustrates the deeper constitutional problem. Ukraine rightly maintains that Crimea remains sovereign Ukrainian territory under illegal Russian occupation. The same principle applies to the other occupied territories.

An election conducted while simply omitting those territories would require careful legal arrangements lest administrative necessity be transformed into an implicit political concession. Ukraine cannot permit Russia’s unlawful occupation to determine who counts as part of the Ukrainian political community.

The problem is not that elections after territorial occupation are philosophically impossible. It is that Ukraine must construct a post-war electoral framework that preserves its territorial claims while establishing a fair mechanism for citizens who cannot vote in their places of permanent residence.

That requires legislation, preparation and international observation — not improvisation under missile fire.

Free elections also require free political competition

Democracy is not merely voting. It requires campaigning.

Candidates must travel. Opposition parties must organise meetings. Journalists must investigate government policy. Politicians must criticise those in power. Television stations must provide competing views. Civil society organisations must scrutinise candidates. Demonstrations must be possible. Public money must be monitored. Government decisions must be challenged.

Wartime necessarily restricts some of these activities.

Information concerning military deployments cannot responsibly be published. Certain infrastructure information must remain secret. Curfews constrain public meetings. Security considerations limit travel. Martial law inevitably enlarges executive authority. National broadcasting arrangements have been transformed by the demands of war.

None of this proves that Ukraine has ceased to be democratic. It demonstrates why wartime government and peacetime electoral competition operate according to different imperatives.

An incumbent government inevitably possesses enormous communicative advantages during war because the President and ministers must address the nation concerning military operations, diplomacy and national security. Opposition politicians cannot realistically demand equivalent airtime every time the Commander-in-Chief speaks about a missile attack.

The distinction between legitimate government communication and electoral campaigning would consequently become almost impossible to police.

Wartime secrecy compounds the difficulty

Suppose an opposition candidate accuses the government of catastrophic military incompetence.

The government may possess classified information proving the accusation false — but cannot publish it without assisting Russia.

Or suppose the accusation is true. Journalists investigating it might need access to classified operational information that cannot safely be released.

Normal democratic accountability therefore becomes distorted. Candidates can make allegations that cannot safely be answered, while governments can invoke national security in circumstances in which voters cannot independently determine whether secrecy is justified.

That is an unhealthy environment for elections, irrespective of who occupies the presidency.

Russian interference would be immense

Russia interferes in western democratic politics even when she is not at war with the countries concerned. To imagine that she would politely refrain from interfering in a Ukrainian wartime election would be extraordinary.

The opportunities would be almost unlimited.

Russian intelligence could finance proxies, manufacture documents, create deepfake recordings, hack campaign organisations, attack electoral databases, spread rumours about military losses, impersonate candidates, circulate fabricated mobilisation orders and use thousands of automated social-media accounts to amplify every Ukrainian political grievance.

Russia would not necessarily need to persuade Ukrainians to support a pro-Russian candidate. That would probably be implausible.

Her objective would be simpler: persuade Ukrainians to hate one another.

Russian information warfare has long understood that destabilisation does not require convincing people of a single lie. It requires flooding the information environment with mutually contradictory narratives until trust itself disappears.

An election would provide the ideal battlefield.

Elections necessarily divide — and that is normally their virtue

Healthy democracies institutionalise disagreement. Candidates attack one another. Governments defend their records. Oppositions promise change. Citizens divide into camps and then accept the result.

Under normal circumstances this is one of democracy’s greatest strengths.

Under conditions of existential war, however, the same mechanism can become dangerous.

Every candidate would have to distinguish himself from the government. That means criticising war strategy, mobilisation, military appointments, negotiations, relations with Washington, relations with Brussels, taxation, procurement and casualties.

Perhaps some of those criticisms would be justified. Indeed some undoubtedly would be.

But an election would transform disagreements presently managed within institutions into public contests for political survival. Ministers would accuse opponents of undermining the war effort. Opponents would accuse ministers of hiding failures. Military commanders might become associated — willingly or otherwise — with political factions. Veterans’ groups could become electoral organisations. Regional grievances could acquire partisan identities.

President Zelenskyy’s warning on 23 August that wartime elections could split Ukraine should therefore not be dismissed merely as the self-interested argument of an incumbent wishing to remain in office. There is a serious structural point behind it. Elections manufacture political competition deliberately. Ukraine presently needs to maintain sufficient political cohesion to survive an invasion.

The Armed Forces must not become politicised

This may be one of the greatest dangers of all.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine enjoy enormous social prestige. Any presidential election would inevitably generate speculation about the political views of senior commanders and celebrated soldiers.

Candidates would seek endorsements. Journalists would ask generals political questions. Rumours would circulate about which military figures supported which parties. Popular commanders might themselves become candidates.

A democratic state ultimately benefits when veterans enter politics. But during an ongoing war, the institutional neutrality of the military is priceless.

A soldier must obey the elected civilian government irrespective of his private political preferences. A commander must issue orders without subordinates wondering whether those orders have partisan implications. The President must appoint commanders without every promotion being interpreted through an electoral lens.

Introducing presidential politics into a fighting army risks damaging precisely the institution upon which the survival of the state depends.

Mobilisation makes the problem still worse

No government wants to conduct an election while ordering citizens into military service.

Every mobilisation decision would immediately become electoral.

Opposition candidates might promise changes to mobilisation rules. The government might be accused of mobilising disproportionately in hostile electoral districts. Individual mobilisation cases would become campaign controversies. Draft avoidance might acquire partisan meaning.

Military necessity and electoral incentives would become hopelessly entangled.

A government fighting for re-election might hesitate to take militarily necessary but electorally unpopular decisions. An opposition might promise policies that military reality cannot sustain.

Wars frequently require governments to make terrible decisions precisely because those decisions are unpopular.

Election campaigns reward the opposite instinct.

Money is another consideration

Proper national elections are expensive.

Ukraine presently requires enormous resources for air defence, ammunition, drones, reconstruction, electricity infrastructure, veterans, displaced citizens and the ordinary operation of the state.

Democracy is worth paying for. But there is little virtue in spending scarce wartime resources upon an election that cannot meet ordinary democratic standards when a lawful mechanism already exists for postponing that election until credible conditions return.

International donors could of course finance much of the electoral process. Yet that introduces another political problem: candidates could accuse foreign governments of financing an electoral timetable advantageous to particular political interests.

Ukraine’s allies should support Ukrainian democracy.

They should not inadvertently become participants in Ukrainian electoral politics.

There is no convincing international-observation solution

Ukraine’s elections have traditionally benefited from extensive international monitoring.

Would thousands of international observers be sent to Kharkiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson during Russian missile and drone attacks?

If not, safer western regions would receive more scrutiny than dangerous eastern ones. If observers were deployed near the front, foreign governments would understandably worry about responsibility for their safety.

An election whose most vulnerable constituencies cannot be properly observed is inherently harder to certify as free and fair.

The problem of the result may be even greater than the problem of voting

Suppose the election is extremely close.

One candidate wins by 50.5 per cent to 49.5 per cent.

The defeated candidate alleges that hundreds of thousands of soldiers could not vote, refugees were excluded, polling stations closed during missile attacks, occupied citizens were disenfranchised and Russian cyber operations manipulated the information environment.

What then?

In peacetime these disputes can be processed through courts and electoral commissions against a background of institutional calm.

During an existential war, a contested presidential result could become a national-security crisis.

Russia would immediately amplify every allegation. She might recognise one side’s claims, manufacture evidence of fraud or encourage protests. Military units might be forced to listen to arguments about which political leader possessed legitimate authority while simultaneously fighting the Russian Army.

Even a five per cent probability of such an outcome should cause responsible statesmen to recoil.

A transfer of power during war creates its own dangers

Suppose instead that everything works perfectly and the opposition wins decisively.

Ukraine would then have to transfer supreme political authority during an existential war.

A new President would acquire responsibility for the Armed Forces, intelligence relationships, classified diplomatic negotiations, weapons procurement, mobilisation and relations with allied governments.

Democratic transfers of power are normal.

Transfers of power while the state is engaged in a struggle for survival are exceptionally dangerous moments.

Russia might intensify military operations precisely during the transition. It could test the incoming administration before ministers had mastered their portfolios. Intelligence services would need to transfer highly sensitive information. Foreign allies would need to establish relationships with new officials. Command structures could change.

Again, none of this means elections should never take place.

It means timing matters.

Nor is a ceasefire necessarily enough

This point deserves particular emphasis.

Ukraine should not automatically proceed to elections the morning after the guns become quieter.

A ceasefire may be unstable. Russia may use it to rearm. Millions of refugees may still be abroad. Soldiers may remain mobilised. Territory may remain occupied. Electoral registers may remain chaotic. Mines may make communities inaccessible. Media institutions may require reconstruction.

Ukraine’s Parliament has already recognised the complexity of this transition. In May 2026 its working group preparing electoral legislation reiterated a consensus that elections cannot be held under martial law while continuing work on the particular requirements of post-war elections.

That is the correct approach.

The first post-war election may be one of the most important elections in Ukrainian history. It should therefore be exceptionally well prepared rather than exceptionally hurried.

None of this means indefinite government without elections

Here lies the essential qualification.

War cannot become a convenient excuse for permanent political incumbency.

The longer extraordinary government continues, the greater the need for parliamentary scrutiny, judicial independence, investigative journalism, anti-corruption institutions, functioning opposition parties and civil society oversight. Wartime necessity can justify postponing elections. It cannot justify abolishing democratic accountability.

Indeed precisely because elections cannot presently perform their normal function, Ukraine’s other democratic institutions become more important.

Parliament must scrutinise government. Courts must remain independent. Corruption investigations must proceed irrespective of political embarrassment. Journalists must remain free to investigate matters that do not genuinely compromise national security. Opposition politicians must remain entitled to criticise the government.

The answer to the impossibility of wartime elections is therefore not less democracy.

It is democracy exercised through every institution presently capable of operating safely.

Russia’s argument about legitimacy should be treated with particular scepticism

Moscow has repeatedly questioned President Zelenskyy’s legitimacy because elections have not taken place. The Kremlin has again seized upon Ukraine’s domestic debate over elections to emphasise alleged divisions in Kyiv.

The argument is remarkable coming from the state responsible for making normal Ukrainian elections impossible.

Russia invaded Ukraine, occupies Ukrainian territory, displaced millions of Ukrainian voters, destroyed Ukrainian towns, attacks Ukrainian infrastructure and continues to expose Ukrainian civilians to missile and drone strikes.

It cannot reasonably create the conditions preventing ordinary democratic elections and then cite those conditions as evidence that Ukrainian democracy is illegitimate.

That resembles an arsonist complaining that the occupants of the burning house have failed to hold their annual residents’ meeting.

Democracy sometimes requires patience

There is a deeper misconception beneath much of this debate.

Democracy is sometimes imagined as a calendar. If an election is scheduled every four or five years, democracy exists. If an election is postponed, democracy disappears.

History tells us otherwise.

Democracy is a constitutional system in which political authority ultimately derives from citizens and in which rulers can be replaced through peaceful, competitive political processes. Extraordinary circumstances may interrupt the electoral calendar without extinguishing that principle — provided postponement remains lawful, temporary and genuinely connected to the emergency.

Ukraine’s obligation is therefore twofold.

First, she must survive.

Second, she must ensure that when conditions permit, Ukrainians regain the fullest possible opportunity to choose their government.

These obligations are not contradictory. The first makes the second possible.

There can be no Ukrainian democratic election if there is no independent Ukrainian state.

The election must come

And when it does, it should be formidable.

Soldiers should vote. Veterans should vote. Refugees should vote. Internally displaced Ukrainians should vote. Citizens emerging from occupation should vote wherever practicable and safely possible. Opposition candidates should campaign without fear. Journalists should interrogate every candidate. International observers should travel throughout the country. Television studios should host furious debates. Governments should defend their records. Challengers should expose their failures.

President Zelenskyy should face the electorate. So should his opponents.

Ukraine’s wartime government should ultimately submit itself to the judgement of the people whose extraordinary endurance has preserved the state.

But that judgment must actually belong to Ukrainians.

It must not be distorted by Russian missiles determining which polling stations open, Russian occupation determining which citizens participate, military deployment determining who can vote, refugee geography determining whose franchise is practical or Russian intelligence determining the informational environment in which political choices are made.

The great democratic achievement of Ukraine since independence has not been that it holds elections mechanically. It is that governments can lose them.

That principle must survive this war.

And precisely because she must survive, Ukraine should resist demands to conduct a premature electoral spectacle under conditions in which the essential ingredients of democratic choice cannot reliably be guaranteed.

Ukraine is not postponing democracy because democracy is unimportant.

She is postponing elections because genuine democracy is too important to counterfeit.

The ballot box must return.

But first there must still be a Ukraine in which to place it.