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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected calls for a wartime election.

Getting into it: While speaking to reporters at a briefing Saturday, Zelensky said holding a vote right now would tear the country apart. “If we want to destroy the country, then during a war like this we can move toward elections,” he said. “Elections right now are a tsunami for the state that will split Ukraine,” he added, saying his strategy is “to bring the country to the end of the war and preserve an independent and sovereign state.”

He said the only way a vote happens mid-war is if Ukraine’s partners can lock down security first (meaning soldiers at the front, people living within range of the shelling, and the millions who fled the country would all have to be able to cast a ballot without Russia dropping missiles on polling stations). So far, nobody has offered him anything concrete on how that would work. Ukrainian law suspends elections under martial law, which has been in place since the invasion began in February 2022. Most of the pressure to hold one anyway has come from Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.

This latest push for an election came from inside Ukraine. Mykhailo Fedorov, who Zelensky fired as defense minister in July after six months in the job, called for a wartime vote in a YouTube address on August 18th. This is the first time a Ukrainian politician of his level has called for one since the invasion. “Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” he said, arguing the country faces a systemic crisis of governance.

Fedorov, Ukraine’s youngest-ever minister when he took office at 28, ran digital transformation for six years and drove the drone warfare strategy. His firing triggered weeks of protests demanding his reinstatement and the removal of army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who Zelensky then dismissed under that pressure. Some of Fedorov’s own supporters backed away once he called for elections.

Despite all of this, polling is on Zelensky’s side. A Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey on August 5th found 57% want to wait until the fighting stops, while separate polling puts backing for a vote before the war ends at 15%. His approval sits around 60%, though Fedorov reportedly leads him in a recent head-to-head runoff poll.