Euromaidan Press is a media partner of Lviv Media Forum 2026. Over the coming days we will bring you selected thoughts and dispatches from speakers across journalism, security, and democratic resilience.
A quarter of Ukraine’s polling stations are out of action. Nearly a million of its voters are at the front. Five to seven and a half million live abroad as refugees. A single Russian missile alert can shut every working polling station in the country at once. The 15 May presidential election deadline Washington pushed came and went without a vote—on Kyiv’s own arithmetic, it was never operable.
Those were the figures the sociologist Tymofii Brik walked through at the Lviv Media Forum last week, in a live recording of the “Sociology Showed” podcast with Babel editor-in-chief Kateryna Kobernyk. This is the operational answer.
10% now, 23% after a ceasefire, 59% only at peace—Ukraine’s verdict on a wartime vote hasn’t moved all year
Names and dates
The figures have a name and a date. Ukraine’s deputy chief election commissioner, Serhiy Dubovyk, told CNN in December that 75% of the country’s polling stations are functional. The total on Ukraine’s State Voter Register is 33,258, which puts the missing quarter at more than 8,000 polling stations, concentrated in occupied territory and the front-line oblasts.
A free, safe national vote, Dubovyk added, would need at least six months of preparation before the first ballot box opened. He has been repeating those numbers to Western reporters ever since.
It now holds approximately 33 million people, of whom five to seven and a half million live abroad.
Where Kyiv’s agency reaches, the picture has moved. The State Voter Register reopened to full use on 1 January 2026, the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion. It now holds approximately 33 million people, of whom five to seven and a half million live abroad—with only 104 foreign polling stations registered to serve them—and more than 1.4 million lack official registration.
The Central Election Commission has been preparing the technical groundwork, and a parliamentary working group has been deliberating on the post-war framework.
Russia’s cyberattacks on Ukrainian state infrastructure make any rushed deployment uniquely dangerous.
Electronic voting, sometimes floated as a shortcut, has no legal framework and no system built, and Russia’s cyberattacks on Ukrainian state infrastructure make any rushed deployment uniquely dangerous. Where Kyiv’s agency does not reach—the line of contact, the refugee camps, the polling halls in occupied or shelled cities—the war freezes the picture.
Historical examples
Other wartime democracies have voted before. Britain held a general election in July 1945; Israel has voted through several conflicts; Ukraine itself voted in May 2014, months after Russia’s first invasion.
The difference Ukrainian institutions point to is operational, not ideological. A nationwide air-raid alarm goes up every time a Russian MiG-31K—the Kinzhal’s carrier aircraft—takes off, because the missile can hit any part of Ukraine within minutes once launched; every working polling station shuts at once when the alarm sounds, and an entire election day can be lost if the alert runs for hours.
Elections cannot be held under those conditions without sustainable peace.
Ukraine’s election-monitoring Civil Network OPORA, together with more than 400 civil society organizations, has declared that elections cannot be held under those conditions without sustainable peace.
Davyd Arakhamia, the Servant of the People parliamentary faction leader who in January proposed a 90-day post-ceasefire vote, made the same case to RBC-Ukraine: Ukraine has “no modern experience—organizationally, politically, or economically. Honestly, we are not really ready for this right now.”
Plausible and implausible dates
The legal calendar adds its own months. Parliament extended martial law for the 19th time on 30 April 2026; it now runs until 2 August 2026. Under a cross-party framework agreed in November 2023, no first post-war election can be called sooner than six months after martial law lifts.
By the CEC’s rules, no plausible Ukrainian vote arrives before spring 2027—and a realistic one, later. Until then, the constitution extends a sitting president’s powers until a successor is sworn in, so the absence of a vote does not create a legal vacuum.
Only one in ten voters wanted elections now.
Through the winter, Washington—its deadline tied to the American midterm calendar—and a chorus of foreign commentators pressed Kyiv to hold a vote on a deadline that, on Ukraine’s own arithmetic, was never operable. Asked the same question by Ukrainian pollsters, only one in ten voters wanted elections now. The 15 May deadline came and went.
At the Lviv Media Forum last week, Brik laid out the political answer, and Kobernyk pushed back. The operational one—the figures Dubovyk gave CNN in December—is still the one Ukraine’s election commission has.
