The President said he “will not abandon his state.” He announced that he intended to run in the elections if they were held during the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he will run in presidential elections if they are held in 2024 during the war. He said this in an interview with Portuguese public television RTP.
“In 2024, if the war continues and if elections are held, I will never leave my state in my life. Because I am the guarantor of the Constitution, and I will defend it in any case,” the president said.
He specified several conditions for holding the election.
“If this is an election, it must be in our territory so that the military can vote, in the first line, so we need observers from all over the world. I want everything to be legal, transparent and democratic, as happened in the election when I became president . When everyone says – clean elections – I don’t want to lose it,” said Zelensky.
He added that Ukraine also has no right to lose people who left as refugees abroad.
“They must have the infrastructure to vote for the candidates. Russia also raises this issue in the elections. We must make sure that there are no risks of bombing, of course, they will, but we must make sure that the people in the stations of the poll is protected,” the president said.
Zelensky noted that Western partners should pay for such elections.
According to the BBC, despite the fact that Ukrainian law and the Constitution prohibit holding elections under martial law, Ukraine’s Western allies have repeatedly indicated that they want to hold elections despite the war.
So, on August 23 in Kyiv, US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said that the elections in Ukraine next year should be held even in war conditions. He believes that “free and fair elections, even during the attack” in Ukraine, can show whether the country has changed in terms of corruption.
Then Zelensky named the main conditions for holding such elections. According to him, first of all, these are changes in the law, because the law clearly prohibits wartime elections and additional funding.
He noted that Western countries that insist on such an expression of will must also share responsibility for wartime elections.
It will be remembered that in May 2020, Zelensky first spoke about the second term of the presidency, although before the election he promised that he would run for one term. As a result, the head of state decided that a presidential cadence was not enough for him.
Source: korrespondent
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