Zelenskyy warns elections during war would 'split Ukraine' as Russia masses missiles

Volodymyr Zelenskyy sat down with a small group of journalists on a Saturday in late August and delivered a blunt message: holding elections in Ukraine right now would be catastrophic. The country, he said, would fracture under the strain. It was his first direct response to a demand that had caught him off guard—a call for a democratic contest from Mykhailo Fedorov, the defence minister he had fired just weeks earlier. Fedorov's push for elections represented something unprecedented since Russia's invasion began: an open challenge to Zelenskyy's authority from within Ukraine's own government.

The timing of Fedorov's demand had shifted the conversation in ways Zelenskyy clearly found troubling. Elections had been suspended since martial law took hold at the start of the full-scale Russian invasion. Zelenskyy's own five-year term had ended in May 2024, but until recently, few Ukrainians had seriously pushed for a vote while the war raged on. That changed when Fedorov, a popular figure, broke ranks. Zelenskyy's response was unsparing. "Elections right now are a tsunami for the state that will split Ukraine," he said, according to a transcript of the briefing released the following day. He framed the idea as not just risky but fundamentally impractical—a distraction from the only goal that mattered: ending the war and keeping Ukraine independent.

Yet Zelenskyy left a narrow opening. If Ukraine's allies could establish specific conditions—if elections could be held safely, legitimately, and with full participation from soldiers on the frontlines, from territories under fire, and from the millions of citizens who had fled abroad—then he would consider it. But those conditions seemed almost impossible to meet. How do you run a democratic election without strikes and shelling? How do you include voters scattered across the globe, many in refugee camps? The president's conditional acceptance was really a way of saying no.

On the question of why Fedorov had been removed, Zelenskyy offered a more measured tone. The former minister had overreached, he said, trying to assume functions that belonged to the military. Zelenskyy claimed he had offered Fedorov four alternative government positions, all of which were declined. "I really had and still have a very positive attitude toward Mykhailo," Zelenskyy said. "We have been through a lot together. But I believe that he himself goes, or is pushed, into the wrong things." The language was careful—acknowledging the relationship while drawing a line.

But the real urgency in Zelenskyy's briefing lay elsewhere. Russia, he said, had stockpiled between 600 and 630 of its most advanced ballistic missiles and was manufacturing more than 100 additional ones each month in preparation for winter. The maximum production capacity was 1,300 per year. These weapons had become Russia's most devastating tool—used to strike Ukrainian infrastructure, warehouses, and the capital itself, with mounting civilian casualties. The problem was acute: Ukraine had almost no way to stop them. Patriot interceptors, the only effective counter, were scarce. The U.S. made only about 600 of the most capable PAC-3 variants annually, and Ukraine was struggling to secure enough.

Zelenskyy said his air force had requested 360 Patriot missiles for the winter months ahead. He had managed to secure an agreement with France for at least one SAMP/T air-defence system and with Germany for roughly 600 PAC-2 and PAC-3 interceptors to arrive in 2027 and 2028. But that timeline was too slow. What Ukraine needed, he argued, was for the United States to release a small portion of its own stockpile—just 5 to 10 percent—to help the country survive the coming months. "It would mean the country could get through the winter," he said, framing it as both a humanitarian and diplomatic necessity.

Meanwhile, Russia was preparing its own escalation. Zelenskyy believed Moscow would attempt to conscript an additional 300,000 soldiers after Russian parliamentary elections scheduled for September. This would be a "peripheral mobilisation," he suggested—conducted in regions far from Moscow and St. Petersburg, away from the capital's scrutiny. The goal was to inject fresh manpower into a frontline that had become nearly deadlocked, and to mount a final push to capture the remainder of Donetsk province by year's end. Zelenskyy expressed confidence that Russia would fail in that objective, but the threat was real and imminent. The winter ahead would be defined by attrition, by the race to secure air defences, and by the question of whether Ukraine could hold its ground—and its unity—long enough for the war to end.