Photo: Volodymyr Zelensky / X
Two of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s political rivals have confirmed that they have been in contact with members of US President Donald Trump’s entourage following a Politico report published on Thursday in which an alleged bid to remove Zelensky from office was revealed.
According to Politico, “secret discussions” have been held about holding snap presidential elections in Ukraine that could potentially unseat Zelensky before a final peace deal is signed.
Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky’s predecessor as president of Ukraine, said in a post on Facebook that his team was working “publicly and transparently” with Kyiv’s US partners “to maintain bipartisan support for Ukraine”, and stressed that he remained “categorically against holding elections during the war”, believing that the Ukrainian presidential election could only take place “after a ceasefire and the signing of a peace agreement with security guarantees for Ukraine”.
According to Politico, the Trump team reached out to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko to discuss whether Ukraine could hold snap presidential elections, which it would be glad to see Zelensky lose. Trump claimed last month that Zelensky’s domestic approval rating stood at just 4%, when it is in fact far higher than Trump’s.
A poll held by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in February indicated that 63% of Ukrainian respondents approved of the president’s policies, and his poll numbers are likely to improve following an outpouring of support on social media after last week’s unprecedented clash with Trump at the White House.
Tymoshenko and Poroshenko, on the other hand, are currently much less popular in Ukraine than Zelensky, with a late February survey by British pollster Survation showing that just 10% of Ukrainian voters said they would support Poroshenko in a presidential election, while only 6% said they would vote for Tymoshenko.
The former commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, who is currently serving as the Ukrainian ambassador to London, has been Zelensky’s main political rival for some time now, with 21% of Ukrainians surveyed saying they supported him.
Tymoshenko also rapidly released a Facebook statement on Thursday to clarify the situation by insisting that her party, Batkivshchyna, was “in talks with all our allies” to help ensure a just peace as soon as possible, adding that holding fresh elections was “out of the question” until peace had been achieved.
Nevertheless, one unnamed Republican foreign policy expert told Politico that both Tymoshenko and Poroshenko were talking to Trump’s allies to position themselves “as people who would be easier to work with” than Zelensky.
