President Donald Trump’s top official says the United States wants Ukraine to hold elections, potentially by the end of the year, especially if Kyiv can agree to a truce with Russia in the coming months.
Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg disclosed this in an interview with Reuters, saying that Ukrainian presidential and parliamentary elections, suspended during the war with Russia, “need to be done”.
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Kellogg said, “Most democratic nations have elections in their time of war. I think it is important they do so. I think it is good for democracy. That’s the beauty of a solid democracy, you have more than one person potentially running.”
Trump and Kellogg have both said they are working on a plan to broker a deal in the first several months of the new administration to end the all-out war that erupted with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
They have offered few details about their strategy for ending the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two, nor when they might unveil such a plan.
The Trump plan is still evolving and no policy decisions have been made, but Kellogg and other White House officials have discussed in recent days pushing Ukraine to agree to elections as part of an initial truce with Russia, two people with knowledge of those conversations and a former U.S. official briefed about the election proposal said.
Trump officials are also debating whether to push for an initial ceasefire before trying to broker a more permanent deal, the two people familiar with the Trump administration discussions said. If presidential elections were to take place in Ukraine, the people said the winner could be responsible for negotiating a longer-term pact with Moscow.
It comes as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that excluding Ukraine from US-Russia talks could be “very dangerous”.
“They [Russia and US] may have their own relations, but talking about Ukraine without us – it is dangerous for everyone,” Zelenskyy warned.
Before being elected, Trump claimed he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine in just one day.
Other Eastern European nations that have held elections in recent months and years have seen allegations of interference from Russia.
Zelenskyy’s five-year term was supposed to end in 2024 but presidential and parliamentary elections cannot be held under martial law – which Ukraine imposed in February 2022.
According to two former senior US officials, Washington raised the issue of elections with officials inside Zelenskyy’s office in 2023 and 2024.
Officials within Kyiv have pushed back on election conversations with Washington before the most recent election, telling Biden officials that holding votes at such a volatile moment risks weakening Ukraine and potentially inviting Russian influence campaigns.
