“The Ukrainian president is thinking and weighing the pros and cons,” said Dmytro Kuleba, speaking via videoconference at the World Political Conference hosted in the United Arab Emirates.
“It’s not that he doesn’t want to hold elections, but holding elections under the current conditions would require unprecedented work and facing unprecedented challenges,” the Ukrainian foreign minister added.
Before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, presidential elections were scheduled for 2024. But martial law, in force since the start of the war, makes electoral functioning difficult.
At the beginning of September, Volodymyr Zelensky had already said that he was ready to organize elections in his country in times of war “if the people need it”.
“It is not a question of democracy,” he assured, but in addition to security issues, there are other issues that need to be resolved, including the voice of soldiers fighting in the trenches, or the arrival of international observers in a war zone.
To this list, Dmytro Kuleba added the organization of voting for millions of Ukrainians abroad and the risk that polling stations in Ukraine “could become perfect targets for Russian missiles and ‘drones'”.
Zelensky has not clearly said whether he will seek a second term, but one of his former advisers, who fell from grace for contradicting the official version of a Russian missile that killed 44 people in Dnipro, has already announced his presidential ambitions.
“Yes, I will flee,” Oleksi Arestovich told the Interfax-Ukraine agency on Wednesday, publishing a reform program on social media.
The military offensive that Russia launched in Ukraine on February 24, 2022 caused the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II (1939-1945), according to the most recent UN data.
The Russian invasion – justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the need to “denazify” and demilitarize Ukraine for Russia’s security – was condemned by most of the international community, which responded by sending weapons to Ukraine and impose political and economic sanctions on Russia.
Source: DN
