(CNN) — It is the biggest challenge to Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky yet, internally. But it will likely, practically, come to nothing.
Dismissed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov’s call for wartime presidential elections strikes at the heart of Zelensky’s vulnerabilities. His sliding popularity, flip-flopping on key personnel decisions, and entanglement in corruption allegations have taken their toll on his poll ratings. A probe into senior officials in Zelensky’s office was announced on Wednesday. Also, a wartime president for six uninterrupted years must take many unpopular decisions.
Now the youthful face of a reformer – Fedorov, the tech wizard, former defense minister who was kicked out for trying to fight the old guard’s arcane and corrupt ways – is demanding something pure, and democratic: a vote. “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia. We are fighting precisely because we want to remain a free European state,” he said, in a remarkable nine-minute speech that came moments after a new defense minister – not him, back in the old job he wanted – was confirmed. But like many things in wartime, it is just not that simple.
A vote is, instead, pretty much impossible. Most electoral experts agree that, even in peacetime, Ukraine would require six months to implement legislative reforms and get the technology in place to conduct a vote that would meet European standards. But there is no ceasefire or end to the fighting in sight. Holding an incomplete vote, or one that feeds into any narrative of the winner being illegitimate, would be a tremendous gift to Moscow. Blind to Russia’s own staged electoral process, the Kremlin has repeatedly pushed the idea that the martial law prohibition on Ukrainian elections in wartime means Zelensky is illegitimate.
A vote could also utterly cripple Kyiv: the losing side could slow legislative reform, and undermine the presidency at every turn. It would spell defeat from within.
Fedorov made his name as a genius innovator. Could similar skills transform the electoral process and make remote voting feasible in wartime? Possibly. But even a digital vote that could somehow include all the frontline troops serving – and remember there are thousands of Ukrainians missing in action, whose status is unresolved – would require a mechanism that would surely exclude the millions of Ukrainian pensioners who live off-line.
What do you say to the Ukrainians living in occupied areas, or the millions living abroad as refugees? How could you physically hold water-tight polls at dozens of consulates across Europe and beyond? Does a frontline soldier trapped with poor comms in a dugout have enough time to study the choices and lodge a vote? Or should they be busy defending their homeland?
It would be an utter mess. Any poll undertaken in wartime would likely be a gift to Russia, and its practiced disinformation and disruption warfare around elections. Europe would be left with an election result that was either a rushed sham endorsement of Zelensky, or a botched and incomplete passing of the baton to another.
The probable winners, according to polling, are either former military chief Valery Zalyuzhni, or Fedorov himself. Both would likely keep Ukraine moving in a similar direction. But both would purge the coterie of advisers around Zelensky, who many of the Ukrainian president’s critics believe are responsible for bad decisions, and whiff of corruption. (A quick reminder: corruption is an unfortunate bedfellow of every war fought).
Growing discontent
So what does Fedorov’s call spell? There is now a new column in Ukrainian politics that is young, has experience of power and reform, and seeks to constantly remind Ukraine that its president has strayed outside of his original electoral mandate. It is an easy position to take, as it is backed by facts, and taps into growing discontent with the war. As forcible mobilisation grows to fill Ukraine’s ebbing ranks, so will anger at the presidency and military.
Fedorov’s call also emphasizes a key question that nobody can answer. If a vote cannot happen in war, then when does that war end? A ghastly winter lies ahead, in which Moscow’s supremacy in ballistic missiles looks set to further exploit Ukraine’s lack of Patriot interceptors. Russia is slowly edging towards its territorial goal of taking the Donbas – albeit through rendering the remaining ground held by Ukraine uninhabitable through horrific drone strikes on all signs of civilian and military life.
The coming winter crunch will feed into the lackluster and purblind peace process that the Trump White House is trying to reignite. It will increase demands on Zelensky to concede territory – anything to get the fighting to stop. He has been clear, most recently in an interview with me, that security guarantees are what Ukraine seeks – to know that any ceasefire is permanent. He ruled out conceding land. He is clear-eyed that the winter ahead is bad, both in the skies and on the frontlines.
When it came to his personal future, he looked stunned when I suggested the political intrigue of Kyiv – the corruption allegations around his erstwhile inner circle, and chicanery of wartime politics – might shackle him to the job after the war has ended, if only to keep wartime critics from hounding his team. He looked aghast and giggled, as if I had lost my mind, and spoke only of seeing his kids and the beach once the war is ended. He didn’t seem like a man who yearns for power indefinitely. Rather the opposite.
But there is no correct mechanism for Zelensky to swap out with a genuine, popular successor, unless he resigns and lets the speaker of parliament take over (a very bad idea, in terms of a voter mandate). The ultimate effect of Fedorov appeal to everyone’s better angels, is that Zelensky is weakened, the questions of his electoral legitimacy amplified, and the call for an end to the war bolstered. Moscow will seize on the row, and surely Trump will – in those moments when the pendulum swings and Ukraine is suddenly the bad guy – again call Zelensky a “dictator.” (He’s not).
Fedorov’s call comes from a place of good – to not let the war destroy Ukraine’s democratic values. But it ignores how far Ukraine had left to travel towards European norms before the war, and the handicaps the conflict puts on these essential processes under nightly Russian bombardment. Wars cannot be fought on ideology alone – a truism that perhaps led to the firebrand former defense minister’s departure, after months of clashes and refusing to deal with the army top brass, as Zelensky describes it.
Ukraine has now added to its immense list of challenges – a crisis in manpower, interceptors, a possible Russian surge in troops through mobilization, and a bleak winter – the discussion of whether its wartime president is legitimate still. Fedorov is right to say ideals should not die in warfare, or why else fight? But conversely, Ukrainians should not die in warfare because their leaders are undermined in the pursuit of unattainable values alone.
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