Governing Without a Mandate: Ukraine's Democratic Paradox in Year Four

May 20, 2024 was a Monday. Air raid sirens sounded across Kyiv, as they had most mornings for over two years. Volodymyr Zelensky gave an evening address from his familiar desk, wearing the familiar olive drab. He spoke about the front lines, about weapons deliveries, about resilience. What he did not mention was that his presidential term had expired that day. Five years earlier, almost to the hour, he had placed his hand on the constitution and sworn an oath. Now the term that oath inaugurated had run out, and nothing happened. No transfer of power, no inauguration, no challenger. Just another Monday in a war that had abolished the political calendar along with so much else.

Nearly two years later, in March 2026, a KIIS poll recorded Zelensky's approval at 62 percent. The number was cited across Western capitals as evidence of continued legitimacy. But legitimacy granted by pollsters is not the same as legitimacy conferred by voters. And the longer this distinction is deferred, the harder it becomes to articulate what, exactly, Ukrainian democracy looks like in its fourth year of existential war.

What the Constitution Says, and What It Doesn't

Ukraine's constitution, adopted in 1996 and substantially amended in 2004, addresses the question of wartime governance with a specificity that almost, but not quite, covers the present situation. Article 83 is unambiguous about the Verkhovna Rada: its authority is extended automatically in the event of martial law or a state of emergency. Elections to parliament cannot be held while martial law is in effect. The provision exists precisely because the framers understood that a legislature must continue to function during a crisis, even if it cannot be renewed through the ballot.

For the presidency, the text is less explicit. Article 103 sets the presidential term at five years. Article 108 enumerates the conditions under which a president leaves office: resignation, inability to perform duties for health reasons, removal through impeachment, or death. Term expiration is not among them, at least not in the way it operates during peacetime. There is no clause that says the president's authority is extended under martial law in the same language that Article 83 uses for the Rada. There is also no clause that says it is not.

This constitutional silence is not an oversight of careless drafters. It reflects a scenario that seemed, in the mid-1990s, unlikely enough to leave unaddressed: a full-scale war of territorial defense lasting years, with entire regions under enemy occupation, millions displaced, and the entire electoral infrastructure compromised. Ukraine's Constitutional Court, which could theoretically resolve the ambiguity, has not issued a ruling. In the absence of a definitive legal answer, the operating assumption is that martial law implicitly extends presidential authority. Most Ukrainian and international legal scholars agree this is the reasonable interpretation. But "reasonable interpretation" is not the same as constitutional mandate, and the gap between the two has grown wider with each month since May 2024.

The Day That Didn't Happen

Zelensky himself addressed his term's expiration only briefly. In the weeks before May 20, 2024, he framed the non-event with a logic that was difficult to argue against on its own terms: Ukraine is fighting for its survival, holding elections during an active invasion is both logistically impossible and a gift to the enemy, and the constitutional framework prohibits elections during martial law. All three points were substantially true. Russian forces controlled roughly 18 percent of Ukrainian territory. Millions of citizens were internally displaced or had fled abroad. The conditions for a free and fair election - voter registration, candidate campaigns, secure polling stations, international observation - did not exist across the entire country.

The Venice Commission, the Council of Europe's advisory body on constitutional matters, weighed in cautiously. Its opinions acknowledged that elections during active hostilities posed severe challenges to democratic standards but stopped short of prescribing a specific timeline or set of conditions for resumption. The commission's position amounted to a recognition that the situation was genuinely difficult, coupled with a reminder that the postponement of elections should not become indefinite.

What disappeared on that Monday in May was not the practical capacity for governance. Zelensky continued to command the armed forces, direct diplomacy, and issue decrees with the same authority he had wielded the day before. What disappeared was something harder to name: the formal renewal of democratic consent. The handshake between a people and their leader that an election represents, however imperfectly. In its place stood polling data, international support, and the unspoken understanding that wartime is not the time for political transitions.

Precedents That Don't Quite Fit

History offers examples, but none that mirror Ukraine's situation closely enough to serve as a template. Each one illuminates a different piece of the problem while leaving others in shadow.

The United Kingdom postponed general elections five times during the Second World War. Parliament passed a series of Prolongation Acts between 1940 and 1944, each extending its own term by one year. The 1935 parliament, elected under Stanley Baldwin, did not face voters again until July 1945. When the election finally came, Churchill lost in a landslide. The British precedent is often cited as evidence that postponement is democratically acceptable during existential conflict. Less often noted is that Churchill governed throughout the war as prime minister, not as an elected president with a fixed constitutional term. The parliamentary system's flexibility offered a legitimacy cushion that Ukraine's semi-presidential system does not provide.

Abraham Lincoln held the 1864 presidential election during the American Civil War, and it nearly destroyed him. With the war going badly in the summer of that year, Lincoln himself believed he would lose. Eleven Confederate states did not participate. The election proceeded anyway, and Lincoln won with 55 percent of the popular vote. The American precedent demonstrates that wartime elections are possible, even brutal ones, when the political will exists. But the United States in 1864 was not facing an invasion of its capital. The fighting, however devastating, was concentrated in the South. Washington, D.C. was not under missile attack.

Israel has held elections during active military operations on multiple occasions, most recently in the midst of the Gaza conflict. The Israeli precedent is perhaps the most frequently invoked, but the comparison strains. Israel is a country roughly the size of New Jersey. Its entire territory is accessible. It faces rocket fire but not territorial occupation of its heartland. The logistical and security challenges of running an election in a country where 18 percent of the territory is under enemy control, where the front line stretches over 1,200 kilometers, and where millions have been displaced are of a fundamentally different order.

France during the First World War did not hold a presidential election either. President Raymond Poincaré, elected in 1913 for a seven-year term, served through the entire war. But France's Third Republic vested most real power in the prime minister and the National Assembly, making the presidency largely ceremonial. The comparison reveals more about constitutional design than about democratic legitimacy under fire.

None of these precedents resolve Ukraine's dilemma. They simply confirm that it is a dilemma, not a question with a clear answer that someone is refusing to give.

The Rada as Democratic Proxy

With presidential elections on hold, the Verkhovna Rada becomes the only institution that can claim continuous democratic authority, however attenuated. The Rada was last elected in July 2019. Its term, like Zelensky's, would have expired under normal conditions, but Article 83's explicit extension gives it firmer constitutional ground. It continues to meet, debate, and pass legislation.

The wartime Rada is not, however, the same institution it was in 2021. Martial law grants the president expanded decree authority. Several opposition parties have been banned or suspended. The most significant was the Opposition Platform - For Life, pro-Russian in orientation, which was banned by court order in June 2022. Other parties, including Petro Poroshenko's European Solidarity and Yulia Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna, continue to operate and maintain their parliamentary factions. The Rada still votes, still scrutinizes the budget, still holds committee hearings. But the wartime dynamic compresses the space for genuine legislative independence.

The mobilization law debate in early 2024 offered a window into how the Rada functions under these conditions. The government's draft bill was contentious, provoking months of committee debate, over 4,000 proposed amendments, and significant public attention. The final version, which entered into force on May 18, 2024, differed substantially from the initial draft. This suggests that legislative pushback remains possible. Whether it constitutes meaningful democratic oversight or merely the adjustment of technical details within a framework the executive has already determined is a question that honest observers answer differently.

Mobilization as Governance

For millions of Ukrainians, the question of democratic legitimacy is not a constitutional abstraction. It arrives in the form of a draft notice. The mobilization law, as amended through 2025 and into 2026, has become the policy area where the state's authority presses most directly on individual lives. It lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25, required all men between 25 and 60 to update their military registration data within 60 days, and integrated the process into digital government platforms including the Diia app. The state's ability to locate, register, and conscript its citizens has expanded dramatically through wartime digitization.

The law's implementation has not been smooth. Reports of forced mobilization, particularly in rural areas and smaller cities, have circulated throughout 2024 and 2025. Videos of recruitment officers detaining men on streets and at checkpoints have appeared on Ukrainian social media, generating anger even among those who support the war effort. The government has periodically acknowledged excesses and promised reforms, including establishing clearer demobilization timelines and improving the treatment of conscripts.

Here the democratic deficit becomes tangible. A government governing without a renewed electoral mandate exercises the most coercive power a state possesses: compelling citizens to risk their lives. Democratic theory has a name for the principle at stake, one that precedes constitutions and opinion polls alike: consent of the governed. In normal times, that consent is expressed through elections. In Ukraine's abnormal times, it is expressed through approval ratings, through the absence of mass protests, through the continued functioning of institutions that predate the war. Whether these substitutes are sufficient is not a question that can be settled by legal argument. It is a question that each Ukrainian answers, privately, every day.

Polls as Proxy Elections

When KIIS published its March 2026 survey showing 62 percent approval for Zelensky, the number circulated through Western media with the force of a verdict. See, the framing implied, Ukrainians still back their leader. The 9-point jump from February's 53 percent was presented as a rebound, a sign of resilience, a data point in favor of continued Western support.

But a poll is not an election. The distinction matters more than most commentary acknowledges. In an election, citizens choose between specific alternatives. They weigh one candidate against another, one platform against another. The act of voting forces a decision that polling never requires. When KIIS asks Ukrainians whether they approve or disapprove of Zelensky's actions as president, the question is measured against an abstraction, not a specific challenger. There is no Poroshenko column, no Zaluzhny column, no "someone else entirely" column that carries the weight of an actual ballot.

Moreover, the polling methodology itself reflects the war's distortions. Occupied territories are excluded from the sample. Internally displaced persons are difficult to reach in proportionally representative numbers. The 62 percent approval is 62 percent of reachable, responding Ukrainians in government-controlled territory. It is real data, collected by a respected institution, but it describes a partial picture of a partial electorate that has no mechanism for translating its views into political consequences.

The 32 percent who disapprove occupy an even more ambiguous position. In a functioning democracy, disapproval finds its expression through the ballot, through an opposition party, a protest vote, a primary challenge. In wartime Ukraine, disapproval has no institutional outlet. You can tell a pollster you disapprove. You cannot vote the president out. The gap between sentiment and agency is the democratic deficit made visible in a single statistic.

The Opposition That Exists in Whispers

Political opposition has not vanished from Ukraine. It has been compressed into forms that are difficult to measure and easy to overlook. Petro Poroshenko, who lost the presidency to Zelensky in 2019 by a crushing margin, remains an active political figure. His European Solidarity party holds seats in the Rada and maintains a media presence. Poroshenko has alternated between supporting the war effort and criticizing specific government decisions, navigating the narrow corridor available to a wartime opposition leader who must appear patriotic while also positioning himself as an alternative.

Valery Zaluzhny occupies a different kind of political space. Dismissed as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces in February 2024 and appointed ambassador to the United Kingdom, Zaluzhny has not declared political ambitions. He does not need to. His popularity in Ukrainian polling, consistently high, represents something that the current political structure cannot accommodate: a potential challenger whose appeal is based on wartime credentials that rival the president's own. Zaluzhny's presence in London, far from the political stage but visible enough to remain in public consciousness, is itself a feature of the wartime system. He is an alternative that cannot be chosen.

Independent media outlets, including Ukrainska Pravda and Babel, continue to publish reporting that is frequently critical of government decisions. Civil society organizations operate under the constraints imposed by martial law but have not been silenced. The United News telethon, created in the first days of the invasion by merging several television channels into a single broadcast, has been criticized for limiting the diversity of media voices, though it has been partially rolled back.

What is missing is not individual acts of dissent but the institutional framework that transforms dissent into political power. Without elections, criticism remains criticism. It does not accumulate into a mandate for change.

The Cost of the Question Itself

There is a reason this essay is difficult to write, and a reason it is necessary. Every sentence about Ukraine's democratic deficit can be clipped from its context and weaponized. Russian state media has called Zelensky an "illegitimate dictator" since the day his term expired. The Kremlin's propaganda apparatus treats the absence of elections as confirmation of its narrative: that Ukraine's democracy is a facade, that Western support for Ukraine is support for authoritarianism, that the war is being prolonged by a leader clinging to power.

This instrumentalization is cynical and transparent. Russia, which has not held a competitive election in decades, has no standing to lecture Ukraine on democratic legitimacy. The Kremlin's concern for Ukrainian voters is as sincere as its concern for Ukrainian civilians.

And yet the question remains legitimate. It remains legitimate because Ukrainians themselves are asking it, in civil society forums, in Rada debates, in the careful language of think tank reports published in Kyiv. It remains legitimate because democracy's strength has never been its ability to avoid uncomfortable questions but its willingness to confront them. The moment Ukraine stops asking whether its wartime governance is democratically adequate is the moment it begins to lose the very thing it is fighting to preserve.

Zelensky has said, repeatedly, that elections will be held after the war ends. The promise is easy to make when the war's end is not in sight. It is also, on its face, reasonable. What makes it insufficient is not its logic but its indefiniteness. Martial law has been extended eighteen times since February 2022, each time by Rada votes in increments of up to 90 days. Each extension is legally defensible. Each extension also moves the goalposts further into a future that no one can define.

The democratic paradox of wartime Ukraine is not that its leaders are behaving undemocratically. By most measures, given the extremity of the circumstances, they are behaving within the bounds of what any democracy might do when its existence is at stake. The paradox is that even justifiable measures, accumulated over years, create a new normal. And normals, once established, resist being temporary.

May 20, 2024 was a Monday. Nearly two years later, it is still Monday. The sirens still sound. The term is still expired. The question of when democratic time resumes remains unanswered, not because anyone is hiding the answer, but because the answer does not yet exist. The war continues, and with it, the suspension. What Ukraine is learning, at great cost, is that democracy is not a condition you either have or lack. It is a practice that atrophies when you cannot exercise it, even when the reasons for the interruption are entirely sound. That is the paradox. It does not resolve. It just persists.