Last week Ukraine’s popular ex-defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov called for wartime elections, in what is widely seen as the biggest challenge to Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Zelensky, whose five-year presidential term ended in May 2024, has been under pressure from both Washington and Moscow to hold new elections, but they have been suspended until after the war is over. Fedorov says that corruption is depriving the military of weapons and making it harder for Kyiv to win the war, and that, “democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia”, although he tells the BBC that he had not himself seen the president engage in any corrupt activity.
The Global Story’s Asma Khalid speaks to Vitaly Shevchenko from BBC Monitoring about where all this could lead.
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00:00 Introduction
02:48 Who is Mykhailo Fedorov?
06:42 How did Fedorov end up outside of Zelensky’s Government?
11:17 How has this impacted Ukraine’s war effort?
12:51 Fedorov calls for elections
14:10 Corruption in Ukraine
17:35 Zelensky’s response
20:20 Zelensky’s ‘rocky’ relationship with Donald Trump
21:59 Could Fedorov force, and win, an election?
23:26 The Trump effect
26:03 Fedorov interviewed
