The 15 May deadline for Ukrainian elections has passed. Only one in ten Ukrainians wanted to meet it

The 15 May deadline Washington pushed for a Ukrainian presidential election came and went. There was no vote, and no one in Kyiv pretended there would be. The reason is not the one US President Donald Trump pressed through the winter—that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is holding onto power by refusing to call an election.

Parliament extended martial law on 30 April for the 19th time, until 2 August 2026, making a national vote illegal. The acute pressure that produced the deadline has since cooled into ceasefire diplomacy. And across every poll taken during the war, the share of Ukrainians who want elections now has stayed in single digits.

Waning confidence

That is the settled question. The unsettled one is underneath it: the same public that won’t accept elections while the war continues is also, slowly, losing some of its confidence in democracy itself.

Both halves were laid out on 15 May at the Lviv Media Forum, in a live recording of the “Sociology Showed” (“Соціологія показала”) podcast hosted by Tymofii Brik, rector of the Kyiv School of Economics and national coordinator of the European Social Survey in Ukraine, with Babel editor-in-chief Kateryna Kobernyk playing the skeptic across the table.

Brik, whose day job is running some of Ukraine’s largest social-survey operations, walked through the polling. “About 10% of people believe that we should have elections right now, regardless of the circumstances. It’s only 10%,” he said. “After the ceasefire, it is about 20 to 25%, depending on the survey. And then, after the complete peace agreement, it’s about 60% of people.”

He was citing the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology’s late-2025 figures. The KIIS November-December Omnibus survey found 10% backing a vote before a ceasefire—down from 11% in September—23% after a ceasefire with security guarantees, and 59% only once the war had fully ended.

One number moved across the year, away from the Trump position, not toward it. Support for a vote after a ceasefire with guarantees rose from 9% in March to 23% in December. Support for elections only after a full peace deal eased from 63% to 59%. The “elections now” share never left single digits.

Brik’s broader point was about how democracies work, not only about this one. A working democracy, he argued, is one where public opinion constrains the government—alongside checks and balances, independent media, and civil rights. Ukraine, he noted with some irony, is sometimes cast—by a fringe of foreign commentators—as a place where the president drives the war and blocks the ballot.

The polling runs the other way. “It is 60% of Ukrainians who believe that we cannot have elections unless we have a complete peace deal. And then 20 to 25% who are waiting for a ceasefire. This is the public opinion. So public opinion puts pressure on our government,” he said. That the pressure runs upward—from voters to government—was the point.

The obvious objection

Kobernyk pressed the obvious objection, the one a hostile reader reaches for first. Of course, an incumbent’s circle prefers no vote: Zelenskyy had just been through the worst stretch of his presidency. In November 2025, Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau NABU exposed Operation Midas, a roughly $100 million kickback scheme at the state nuclear operator Energoatom. The alleged organizer was Timur Mindich, Zelenskyy’s former business partner from his Kvartal 95 days.

Two ministers were dismissed; Andriy Yermak, the head of the President’s Office and the second-most-powerful man in the country, resigned on 28 November after investigators searched his home. And in a hypothetical runoff that December, the former army chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi would have beaten Zelenskyy 64% to 36%. A man who would lose an election is not a neutral source on whether to hold one.

Brik did not dodge it. He conceded the trust damage—Zelenskyy’s numbers had fallen about 10 points when the scandal broke—and then made the harder point. The “wait” preference is not a Zelenskyy preference. Among Ukrainians who say they completely distrust the president, only 28% want an immediate vote, the same KIIS survey found.

People who would vote him out still do not want a wartime election. And the scandal that dented him was not buried: it was exposed by Ukraine’s own anti-corruption institutions, mid-war, against the president’s inner circle—the checks-and-balances half of Brik’s definition, working as it happened. By mid-December, with Yermak gone, trust had recovered to roughly 63%.

What “elections now” would actually mean

The clearest answer to what a vote now would mean came from Moscow. At his year-end Direct Line on 19 December 2025, Vladimir Putin said Russia could “consider” pausing deep strikes—on voting day only—and then demanded that the five to ten million Ukrainians he said were living on Russian territory be allowed to vote there. That is the concrete content of the call for a vote now: a one-day reprieve from bombardment, and millions of people under Russian control casting ballots under Russian supervision.

The deputy head of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission, Serhiy Dubovyk, told CNN in December that only 75% of polling stations are operational, with nearly a million citizens serving in the army and more than six million abroad.

Trump’s framing had been categorical. Ukraine, he said in December, “is on the point of where it’s not a democracy anymore.” Zelenskyy’s elected term ran out in May 2024; he remains in office because the constitution extends a president’s powers until a successor is sworn in, and martial law bars the election that would produce one.

The crack underneath

This is where the less settled question surfaces. Polled by the Razumkov Center in November 2025, Ukrainians backing democracy as the single best system stood at 55.5%—down from 73% in May 2023, the wartime high. An 18-point fall, in the middle of the war. The floor has held: 87% still say a democratic system is good for Ukraine, flat since 2017, and 49% say order can come only through electoral democracy, the rule of law, and independent courts, up from 42% in March 2024. But the enthusiasm has thinned.

Brik put the contradiction plainly. “A country can have elections, but it is not enough to have elections to be qualified as a democracy. You also must have checks and balances. You must have independent media. You must have civil rights,” he said. “Ukraine right now doesn’t have a major factor of democracy—we do not have elections, for obvious reasons. But besides elections, we have everything else.”

The external scoring agrees with him. Freedom House rates Ukraine 51 out of 100 for 2025, “Partly Free,” up two points from the previous year. Russia scores 12, “Not Free,” in the same report; Russian-occupied Ukraine scores -1. Russia holds elections and still ranks 39 points below Ukraine on the index Washington cites most.

That was Brik’s point: the vote, on its own, is not what the index measures. Ukraine, barred from voting under martial law, clears a bar Russia falls below—because Russia’s elections are controlled and the state dominates the opposition and the press.

European Social Survey data, Brik said, show democratic support eroding across Europe and North America, not only in Ukraine. Against that drift, Ukraine still runs the other way—for now.

The question left on the table

Near the end, Kobernyk put the dilemma directly to Brik and to the room—a Lviv Media Forum audience of journalists, editors, and researchers: preserve Ukraine as a democracy, or ensure the nation survives even if that costs democracy? The room split almost evenly, the democratic side ahead by a sliver.

Brik chose democracy and explained why in terms that did not make the choice easy. “If we don’t have democracy here, there will be no mechanism to protect democratic institutions,” he said.

“There are countries around the globe that start wars with other countries. They kill people from other countries. I would rather commit to democracy because if we don’t have democracy, then what is the point? What is the point of having any other type of government? Because other types of government will bring misery to our own people, and they will bring misery to people outside.”

Brik also named a horizon: three to five years. Until then, martial law—extended to 2 August 2026—keeps the question legally closed, and the cross-party framework agreed in 2023 bars a first post-war vote sooner than six months after it lifts. When it finally comes, he said, the push will come from Ukrainians, not a foreign deadline.