At the weekend, Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that “elections right now are a tsunami for the state, which will split Ukraine.” The remark followed weeks of pressure from his former defence chief, Mykhailo Fedorov, dismissed last month in a cabinet reshuffle and now demanding a vote he calls overdue.
Martial law has barred national polls since the war’s opening months, and Ukrainian statute keeps the ban in force for as long as the fighting lasts. Zelenskyy won his current term in 2019 and would ordinarily have met voters again in 2024, a deadline the war swept aside.
Fedorov’s break with the president, the first from a senior official since the fighting began, forced a question many had left unspoken. Does the presidency still answer to a rival power capable of checking it, or has command simply become permanent? Increasingly, the check that counts operates out of Brussels, which wields funding and accession terms Kyiv cannot brush aside.
A Governance Crisis Zelenskyy Built Himself
Fedorov’s exit rattled public confidence across Ukraine’s cabinet and streets alike. Many Ukrainians credited him with steering the country’s pivot toward drone-heavy, high-tech warfare, and his departure struck them as self-inflicted damage mid-war.
Thousands gathered across Kyiv in the days after, and the presidency has now reshuffled its cabinet four times since the war’s opening months, a pace sceptics read as improvisation dressed up as strategy.
An early-August survey found that 57% of Ukrainians would rather wait until the fighting stops before voting. Zelenskyy’s own approval remains near 60%, leaving him little reason to press the point himself. Support for Fedorov’s own bid has stayed thin in every survey pollsters have carried out since his dismissal, reinforcing the sense Ukrainians want reform without new leadership.
Echoes of Bonapartism, Real or Imagined
The comparison to strongman rule is not new, and it did not begin in Kyiv. Historians of wartime leadership have long noted how leaders such as Napoleon Bonaparte and various twentieth-century caudillos used prolonged emergencies to justify power no ballot could remove.
Donald Trump, during an earlier dispute over a peace framework, called Zelenskyy “a dictator without elections,” a line he later denied uttering even as it echoed talking points Moscow had long used.
Western diplomats had privately favoured a return to the ballot the previous year, lawmakers who track the file say, fearing a presidency without electoral renewal loses its footing with time. Martial law has folded emergency powers into the president’s office since the war’s start, letting Zelenskyy’s team direct policy with limited legislative friction.
The label rests uneasily, though, on a president whose own party controls parliament without a serious rival waiting in the wings. Such dominance makes any bid for permanent power look simply unnecessary.
Brussels Fills the Gap Kyiv Leaves Open
Ukraine’s wider accession talks opened their toughest chapter this year, covering courts, procurement and financial oversight under what negotiators call the Fundamentals cluster. If Ukrainian politics currently lacks a credible domestic challenger, its European partners have shown they can still draw a line.
Last year, parliament rushed through legislation folding Ukraine’s two anti-graft bodies under the prosecutor general’s office, a step many at home and in Brussels read as insulation for the president’s own circle. The European Commission trimmed close to €1.5 billion from a Ukraine Facility payment, delivering roughly €3 billion against the €4.5 billion Kyiv had sought, and Zelenskyy reversed the law within days.
The reversal did not end the friction between the president’s office and Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies. Investigators have since reopened inquiries involving several people close to Zelenskyy, as Brussels links the pace of membership talks to precisely such independence. Zelenskyy himself remains outside the list of suspects, though the accumulation of names around him has become its own political liability.
A Fragile, Externally Anchored Equilibrium
This account does not settle whether Ukraine is drifting toward personal rule or simply enduring the improvisations any government makes under total war. What the record confirms is a president who bends only after external pressure lands, and institutions in Brussels willing to keep applying it.
The genuine trial of Ukraine’s institutions will not happen with a vote inside the war. It will happen once the guns fall silent and Zelenskyy, or whoever follows him, must hand power to an opponent citizens choose freely, on their own timetable.
A credible fix would bind any future ceasefire to a fixed, internationally verified election timetable, closing the exact gap Fedorov’s challenge opened up. Until then, the most reliable restraint on Kyiv’s wartime presidency will keep flowing from the accession terms Brussels controls, a substitute for the ballot box the law currently closes.
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