Swapping the president for peace: why Zelenskyy wants to hold elections and a referendum on the same day

2026 is meant to be the year when Russia's war against Ukraine comes to an end. Or not. Unfortunately, no one in the world knows for certain which of these two possibilities is more likely to materialise. And therefore Ukraine must be prepared for both scenarios.

In fact, this preparation for both peace and war at the same time is the defining feature of the new political phase that began in Kyiv on 28 November 2025, when Andrii Yermak's resignation as head of the President's Office also marked the end of a long period of slow stagnation.

All the reshuffles carried out by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy using the cards available to him aligned with this dual-track strategy.

To breathe new life into the Ukrainian armed forces, the president took the rather bold decision to appoint Mykhailo Fedorov as the new minister of defence. Fedorov's team took on a substantial list of commitments to reform the approach to conducting the war and received broad powers from the president to do so, including carte blanche to replace commanders at the highest levels.

The peace track has undergone some equally dramatic changes. Most significantly, the key players in negotiations with Ukraine's international partners have changed. Instead of Yermak's former monopoly over any peace-related interaction, the negotiation process has been divided into several parallel channels that complement one another.

Security issues have been handed over to a triumvirate consisting of Kyrylo Budanov, the new Head of the President's Office, Rustem Umierov, the long-serving Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, and Davyd Arakhamiia, the now somewhat forgotten chief negotiator in Istanbul.

Economic issues are being addressed with the help of Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko and her ministers.

Given this concentration of political heavyweights, the negotiation process itself seems to be the priority for Zelenskyy's team.

An imminent diplomatic breakthrough appears unlikely right now. But if tangible progress were suddenly to be achieved, the president would then face the next challenge: holding elections in a war-torn country and legitimising the outcome of the negotiations through a nationwide referendum.

At least, that's the sequence of actions that around a dozen senior officials from the president's team have described in conversations with Ukrainska Pravda in recent weeks.

The president himself has also been talking seriously since December last year about the need to get ready for elections and the possibility of holding a referendum. A working group was urgently convened in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) to draft the relevant legislative amendments.

Why has Zelenskyy started talking about elections? Is the government genuinely preparing for one, or is this yet another performance put on for the public? Why has the working group been set up in parliament? And why does the president want to hold elections and a referendum on the same day, even though this is prohibited by law? Ukrainska Pravda decided to investigate.

From words to action: how the parliamentary working group on elections operates

"I am ready for ever," was Zelenskyy's reply on 9 December 2025 when US President Donald Trump insisted that "it's time" for presidential elections to be held in Ukraine.

A few weeks later, the new parliamentary working group tasked with drafting legislation on elections during a special or post-war period met for the first time. The group is chaired by Oleksandr Korniienko, First Deputy Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada and leader of the Servant of the People party.

The day before the meeting, a high-ranking source within the Servant of the People party told Ukrainska Pravda ironically: "We will gather now, but the larger the working group, the later its work will produce a result."

All those politicians who back in early December had feared that the president might call an election within a week were able to breathe easy when they saw over 60 names listed in the pool of experts.

They include members of parliament, government officials, representatives of the Central Election Commission (CEC) and civil society leaders. These experts are now examining various aspects of the business of enabling the will of the people to be expressed, ranging from ensuring compliance with international commitments to working out how military personnel, internally displaced persons and refugees abroad can exercise their right to vote. With such a broad remit, drafting the law could take years.

Irony aside, the fact that the electoral ball is now in parliament's court is a positive development. A year ago, in early 2025, Ukrainska Pravda reported that small working groups attached to the CEC had drawn up recommendations on the preferred format for holding the first post-war elections and submitted them to parliament. We described these in detail.

Read more: Long-distance relationship: is Ukraine ready for remote voting?

Over the past year, almost none of the key challenges of holding elections have changed. The only difference is that there is now a working group within parliament, which means that it should end up producing a bill.

The experts in the parliamentary group have plenty of issues to consider, both political and technical. First and foremost, is holding an election constitutionally possible? Even the date could be a stumbling block here. Hardline constitutional lawyers insist that the next presidential elections must be held exactly when stipulated by the Ukrainian Constitution – on the last Sunday in March.

It's also important to decide where elections could be held within Ukraine, how voting abroad should be organised, and ultimately, where the money for all this will come from.

The Central Election Commission is currently in a bind: it cannot make preparations for wartime elections under the existing legislation, and updated legislation has yet to be adopted.

"The CEC has considered various options to resolve the issue of voting abroad: postal voting, electronic voting, and so-called extended voting, which involves setting up additional polling stations outside diplomatic missions," explains CEC Chairman Oleh Didenko.

"Within Ukraine, the electoral infrastructure needs to be audited in order to find out which polling stations can be reused and how much time and resources this will require, and which ones will need to be replaced [if they have been destroyed in Russian attacks – ed.]. This will affect the calculations.

The same applies abroad. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs needs time to determine how many polling stations there will be, how much they will cost and so on. Only then will we be able to put a budget request together, because at the moment there's nothing to calculate."

The organisation of elections is further complicated by the fact that the CEC does not have accurate data on the number of voters in Ukraine and abroad. On 1 January 2026, the State Register of Voters became fully operational for the first time since the start of the full-scale invasion. However, the speed with which the information can be updated depends entirely on Ukrainian citizens themselves. Each voter must update their personal details if there has been any change by contacting the CEC (or a Ukrainian diplomatic mission if they are living abroad).

Ukraine's Western partners have never raised any questions about the legitimacy of the Ukrainian parliament. If there's ever any discussion of elections during negotiations, it will only be about presidential elections. By law, a presidential campaign can last 90 days. But as things stand now, no one can predict how much time it will take to prepare for elections after a possible ceasefire, or whether voting will be possible at all.

When Ukrainska Pravda asked Didenko about possible timeframes for organising elections, he said: "I give everyone the same answer: as far as the Central Election Commission is concerned, the more time, the better. The more time we have, the better prepared we will be."

As Ukrainska Pravda knows from its sources in Team Ze! (Zelenskyy's team), at the end of last year Didenko was invited to the Verkhovna Rada for an audience with the parliamentary leadership. Virtually the only question he was asked was "How much time do you need?" He replied that six months would be good, to which the response was: "Won't 60 days be enough? We need to fit it in."

Didenko told us: "In our recommendations on the draft law, we indicated the timeframe that would be desirable for the CEC – the electoral process should begin no earlier than six months after the end of martial law. I don't know whether our opinion will be taken into account. On the other hand, the Central Election Commission will implement whatever law Parliament adopts."

The working group has already met several times in Parliament. The experts have been divided into seven subgroups, which have to draw up detailed proposals for conducting elections under the current conditions.

According to First Deputy Speaker Oleksandr Korniienko, MPs are expected to come up with legislative options by the end of January. However, Ukrainska Pravda sources among the pool of experts are sceptical of such forecasts – and of the group's work in general.

"The parliamentary working group is ineffective," believes one representative of the working group, an opposition MP. "I don't think its activities will produce any results at all. It's just a talking shop."

Presidential elections and referendums

Any agreement on ending or at least halting the war will involve one unpleasant detail for the authorities: someone will have to sign it.

Judging by the conversations Ukrainska Pravda has had with a large number of senior officials serving in various branches of government, there are very few, if any, people willing to shoulder this responsibility.

Most of the people we spoke to view the prospect as about as appealing as the proverbial bullet to the head, even if the agreement were to contain strong security guarantees and compensation for Ukraine. Having to sign up to essentially recognising (albeit temporarily) the loss of control over significant territories would be political suicide.

The President's Office has therefore spent quite some time searching for a way to share this responsibility with someone else.

The existing versions of the peace deal that Ukrainian, European, US and Russian delegations have been discussing in various formats in recent months envisage certain territorial concessions being made by Ukraine. Under the Constitution, no changes may be made to Ukraine's territorial structure except by means of a nationwide referendum.

And even though the recognition of a temporary loss of control over territories does not constitute a change in the structure as it is understood in the Constitution, the idea of a referendum seemed like a lifeline to the technocrats in the President's Office.

Zelenskyy's team's plan is that if there is a peace deal, the president will share the responsibility for it and its consequences with the entire nation: Ukrainians themselves will have to approve or reject the peace plan in a referendum.

All last year the US, under Moscow's influence, kept talking about the need to get the electoral process started in Ukraine and hold a presidential election. And the President's Office decided to make use of this demand – to shift part of the responsibility for the peace plan onto Ukrainians at the same time as they vote for the head of state. This is despite the fact that current electoral legislation explicitly prohibits holding elections and a referendum at the same time.

The reason for combining the two processes is very simple, according to several Ukrainska Pravda sources at the President's Office on Bankova Street and in Parliament.

First, there is a possibility that the vote would have to be held without the war having fully ended – during a ceasefire, relying on a phantom promise from Russia not to attack. And if two separate votes were organised, security challenges might mean that neither would take place.

Second, it costs a lot of money to organise a nationwide vote, so merging the two processes into one could yield tangible savings – although it will be impossible to calculate even approximate figures until the new law is passed, as it is not known where or how voting will take place.

Third, Ukraine has very limited experience of holding referendums, but what experience it does have shows that turnout can be very low. And since the whole idea of such a plebiscite would be to give its results maximum legitimacy through the broadest possible public participation, the people at Bankova Street figured that a presidential election could act as a kind of electoral magnet.

One influential Servant of the People party member explains the logic behind the idea: "Presidential elections always raise the temperature the most, everyone's interested in them, everyone turns out for them. That's why Zelenskyy is proposing: let's hold elections, people will come out to the polling stations, and they can vote in the referendum as well. Otherwise, the whole thing could fail."

The devil, as we all know, is in the details. And in this case, the referendum will boil down to how the question is worded. What exactly will Ukrainians be asked to approve: only territorial concessions, or the entire package of agreements, including compensation, reconstruction aid and security guarantees?

Ukrainska Pravda sources in the government insist that if this was only about concessions, "there would be no need to hold a referendum at all".

"People need to understand the situation as a whole and make a decision as a whole as well: in some places we'll gain, in others we'll lose. But it will be a joint decision for everyone," a source in the Servant of the People leadership told Ukrainska Pravda.

The opposition, however, has a diametrically opposite interpretation of Zelenskyy's idea.

An Ukrainska Pravda source among opposition MPs said: "Holding an election at the same time as a referendum is a technique for re-election. It's been tried and tested in Moldova, for example. Zelenskyy can use the moment to get re-elected, because he realises that he won't be winning elections after the war. His pledge will be very simple: 'I will come and sign off on peace.' People may vote for that."

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Working groups are meeting, politicians and officials are debating, constitutional lawyers are fighting for the Constitution – yet these discussions are unlikely to have any real impact on whether elections are brought closer or postponed.

Ukraine is interested in ending the war as soon as possible, because the economic, energy and political situations are becoming increasingly difficult and less and less controllable.

Whether the Russians have any interest in signing a peace agreement remains an open question. The answer largely depends on whether the US is willing to put pressure on Moscow once Ukraine has agreed on all the points and decides on elections or a referendum.

It might seem that for the White House, it would be logical to expedite matters so that this "ninth war to be ended by Trump" could be used in the campaign for the midterm congressional elections. But the US government's overall agenda raises doubts as to whether they ever remember the war in Ukraine at all.

For now, Trump appears more focused on his crazy games – seizing territory from NATO allies, convening "his own UN" for the Middle East, or abducting dictators from other countries.

On the one hand, this is a good thing: the Americans are busy, and Ukraine can take a break from having more Russian "points" foisted on us. But on the other hand, Ukraine has never been closer to losing the US's interest completely and being left face to face with the enemy.

Author: Roman Romaniuk, Anhelina Strashkulych, Ukrainska Pravda
Translation: Anna Kybukevych and Yelyzaveta Khodatska
Editing: Teresa Pearce