At the meeting in Saudi Arabia, the US reportedly discussed elections in Ukraine as being a key part of any peace deal. Trump himself has raised the prospect of elections , noting in a February 18 press conference:“We have a situation where we haven't had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law.”

The US president went on to claim, incorrectly, that Zelensky's approval rating was down to“4%.” The latest polling actually shows the Ukrainian president to be sitting on a 57% approval rating . A day later, Trump upped the attacks , describing Zelensky as a“dictator without elections.”

Such statements echo Russia's narrative that the government in Kyiv is illegitimate. The Kremlin's claims regarding what it describes as the“legal aspects related to his [Zelensky's] legitimacy” are based on the premise that the Ukraine president's five-year term as president of Ukraine should have ended in 2024.

And, elections in Ukraine would have taken place in May of that year had it not been for the martial law that Ukraine put into place when the Russian Federation launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The Martial Law Act – which Ukraine imposed on February 24, 2022 – explicitly bans all elections in Ukraine for the duration of the emergency action.

And while the Ukrainian Constitution only includes language regarding the extension of parliament's powers until martial law is lifted, constitutional lawyers in Ukraine tend to agree that the implication is that this also applies to presidential powers.

Notwithstanding what the law says, the Kremlin's questioning of the democratic institutions of Ukraine and its push for elections in Ukraine have found traction in Washington of late.

Trump's special envoy, General Keith Kellogg, declared on February 1 that elections“need to be done” as part of the peace process, saying that elections are the“beauty of a solid democracy .”

Zelensky is not opposed to elections in principle and has agreed that elections should be held when the time is right.“Once martial law is over, then the ball is in parliament's court – the parliament then picks a date for elections,” Zelensky stated in a January 2 interview.

And he appears to have the backing of the majority of Ukrainians. In May 2024, 69% of Ukrainians polled said Zelensky should remain president until the end of martial law, after which elections should be held .

The issue, as Zelensky has said, is the timing and circumstances.“During the war, there can be no elections. It's necessary to change legislation, the constitution and so on. These are significant challenges. But there are also nonlegal, very human challenges,” he said on January 4 .

Even opposition politicians in Ukraine agree that now is not the time. Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky's main political rival, has dismissed the idea of wartime elections , as has Inna Sovsun, the leader of the opposition Golos Party .

Apart from the logistical problems of ensuring free and fair elections in the middle of a war, the conflict would present logistical hurdles to campaigning and accessing polling sites.

There is also the question of whether and how to include Ukrainians in Russian-occupied territories and those who are internally displaced, as well as the 6.5 million who fled fighting and currently reside abroad.

Russia did, of course, hold elections during the current conflict . But the 2024 election that Putin won with 87% of the vote was, according to most international observers, neither free nor fair .

Rather, it was a sham vote that only underlined what most political scientists will confirm: Elections are at best a necessary but insufficient marker of democracy.

This point is not wasted on Ukrainians, whose commitment to democracy strengthened in the years leading up to the 2022 invasion . Indeed, a survey taken a few months into the war found that 76% of Ukrainians agreed that democracy was the best form of governance – up from 41% three years earlier.

There are other reasons Ukraine might be wary of elections. The adversarial nature of political campaigns can be divisive, especially in a society under high stress.

Ukrainian politicians have openly argued that holding an election during the war would be destabilizing for Ukrainian society, undermining the internal unity in face of Russian aggression.

And then there is concern over outside influence in any election. Ukrainians have had enough experience with Russian meddling in their politics to take it for granted that the Kremlin will attempt to put a thumb on the scale.

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Russia has since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 employed its substantial resources to influence Ukraine's politics through all available means, ranging from propaganda, economic pressures and incentives to energy blackmail, threats and use of violence.

In 2004, Moscow's electoral manipulations in favor of the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, led to the Orange Revolution – in which Ukrainians rose up to reject rigged elections.

Nine years later, Yanukovich – who became president in 2010 – was deposed though the Revolution of Dignity , which saw Ukrainians oust a man many saw as a Russian stooge in favor of a path toward greater integration with Europe.

Putin's history of meddling in elections extends beyond Ukraine, of course. Most recently, the Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the country's presidential elections, citing an electoral process compromised by foreign interference .

An impossible position

In raising elections as a prerequisite to negotiations , Putin is setting a“catch-22” trap for Ukraine: The Ukrainian Constitution states that elections can happen only when martial law is lifted; but the lifting of the martial law is possible only when the“hot phase” of the war is over. So without a ceasefire, no election is possible.

But in refusing to agree to elections, Ukraine can be cast as the blockage to any peace deal – playing to a narrative that is already forming in the US administration that Kyiv is the problem and will need to be sidelined for there to be progress.

In short, in seemingly echoing Russian talking points on an election being a prerequisite for peace, the US puts the Ukrainian government in an impossible position: Agree to the vote and risk internal division and outside interference, or reject it and allow Moscow – and, perhaps, Washington – to frame Ukraine's leaders as illegitimate and unable to negotiate on the behalf of their people.

Lena Surzhko Harned is associate teaching professor of political science, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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