Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 meant any Ukrainian president would acquire peculiar power. Defense, intelligence, diplomacy, mobilization, and public messaging all require speed and coordination that peacetime government cannot provide. But the recent dismissal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov raised a sharper question: Under Volodymyr Zelensky, does that power still answer to institutions capable of checking it and is it being used properly?
Ukraine’s emergency constitution: stronger powers, not a blank check
Ukraine’s Constitution was created to survive a crisis, not to disappear during one. Ukraine is a democratic, social, law-based state in the sense of Article 1. Article 5 gives the people sovereignty and prevents anyone from usurping state power. Article 6 requires separation of powers (a mixture of parliamentary and presidential power). Article 8 lays out the supreme legal authority of the Constitution. None of these lapse under martial law. These provisions are the line between emergency government and personalized rule.
The president’s wartime powers are real but not unconditional. Under Article 106, he may declare martial law or a state of emergency nationwide or in specific regions. Under Article 85, the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) must approve those decrees. The system is deliberately split: the executive moves quickly, and parliament gives constitutional approval. Article 64 allows for restrictions on certain rights under martial law (movement, assembly, political activity, wartime communications) but doesn’t enable them to be absolute. In real emergencies, the Constitution allows the state to intervene more aggressively. It doesn’t turn Ukraine into a presidential system without laws. International law adds to that line.
Parliament and elections: continuity without removal
Parliament does not disappear when martial law is declared. Article 83 states that if the Rada’s term expires during martial law or a state of emergency, its mandate continues until a newly elected parliament convenes after the emergency ends. This is a continuity clause, aimed at avoiding an institutional vacuum, and not just to justify passivity.
Elections are therefore suspended under martial law and the sitting government does not become illegitimate just because a vote has been postponed under circumstances that the Constitution explicitly anticipates. But postponed elections change the democratic balance. And when voters can’t renew mandates, responsibility for accountability falls to parliament, courts, oversight bodies, civil society, and a free press. And those institutions have to work even harder than before simply because the ballot box is closed.
Centralization is not evidence of overreach. The real warning signs are more specific: parliament rubber-stamping major measures with little debate; opposition voices sidelined beyond any clear security need; media control that goes beyond any legitimate justification; decision-making handed off from accountable ministries into an unelected presidential circle; and little oversight of procurement, appointments, mobilization, and corruption.
The test of wartime constitutionalism is not whether parliament meets and votes, but whether it keeps the practical power to question, amend, investigate, delay, and—if necessary—refuse.
Bankova rule
The most common criticism of Zelensky’s wartime style is the “Bankova rule”: not only that the president is powerful, but that the real authority is in the Presidential Office on Bankova Street rather than with the Cabinet, ministries, parliamentary committees, and independent institutions.
Critics say a tiny group of unelected presidential aides makes the decisions that matter and that Parliament ratifies outcomes – not shapes them. Abrupt reshuffles have created the impression that ministers are in service of the president and his aides, not law or performance.
The Fedorov case
The sudden dismissal of Fedorov, a Zelensky ally in digital transformation, drone development, and defense innovation, was the most direct internal challenge to Zelensky since the invasion began and spurred rare wartime protests. To Fedorov’s supporters, this was not just a personnel change but the sidelining of a popular and capable innovator and reformer who had tried to curb corruption within his ministry.
The episode also brought the election problem into public view. Fedorov held back at first and then on Aug. 18 called on Ukraine to find a “legal, safe and realistic mechanism” for wartime elections, saying democracy could not be “held hostage” by Russia. Critics contend that elections are not possible under the current Constitution and martial law and that voting amid missile strikes, occupation, mass displacement, and active conflict is not feasible.
The Fedorov affair struck a nerve because it brought together so many anxieties at once: an opaque dismissal, protests signaling that some citizens no longer see wartime unity as a substitute for accountability, and a broader sense that parliament is asked to ratify decisions made elsewhere – inside the president’s tightly centralized inner circle.
Fedorov’s call for elections cost him considerable sympathy. But the near-unanimous vote by parliament on Aug. 19, including Zelensky’s opponents, to approve his dismissal and replace him with a military officer rather than a civilian – the general did in fact resign from the military just before the vote – raised its own questions about the independence of government.
The broader context
The series of separate but overlapping allegations has revealed the problems with Bankova and the president’s involvement or lack of involvement in this. At the end of 2025, Tymur Mindich, a Ukrainian-Israeli former business associate and close friend of Zelensky, became the center of what is now called the Midas corruption scandal. His close friend Andriy Yermak, who was chief of the Presidential Office and was said to have unbridled influence, had to resign and is now under investigation for corruption.
This week, a further investigation known as Operation Forrest Gump, apparently linked to the Mindich case, again placed the president’s inner circle at the center of corruption and influence-network allegations. Iryna Mudra, deputy head of the Presidential Office, was dismissed and detained on Aug. 19. She is currently undergoing investigative actions by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).
What matters analytically is the pattern: a long history of corruption allegations that are too close to the presidential circle and the opaque personnel decisions and little institutional distance between the head of state and those under scrutiny. That’s a political cost no matter how legal it is because it underscores that access, protection and power have coalesced around Bankova in ways that go beyond ordinary accountability and that the people in charge have used the system to profit from the corrupt.
That domestic accountability issue stands in stark opposition to Zelensky’s international record abroad. That success is real and shouldn’t be ignored. But international standing built on democratic credibility cannot be divorced from domestic governance. A leader who asks partners to trust Ukraine’s institutions and reward them for their sacrifices cannot leave the impression that his office operates on informal hierarchies, selective accountability and opaque loyalty networks.
Bottom line
Martial law in Ukraine is legal. The Verkhovna Rada does approve emergency decrees, but critics say it has become a mere rubber stamp. Elections can be postponed during wartime. Zelensky has not broken the formal constitutional framework and his international advocacy has helped Ukraine survive.
But formal legality and international stature are not enough on their own. The real test is whether emergency power is still necessary, proportionate, temporary, and answerable to institutions still capable of saying no – and to anti-corruption bodies that, at least for now, appear willing to expose serious problems at the very top.
Even so, taken together – Bankova-centered decision-making, the Fedorov dismissal, the Mindich, Yermak, and Forrest Gump allegations, and a parliament critics describe as reactive rather than deliberative – these point toward a democratic deficit that the war does not fully explain, and the Constitution does not permit. That is why so many young Ukrainians have taken to the streets in peaceful protest.
Ukraine can justify strong presidential coordination as a matter of national survival. What it cannot afford is letting that coordination harden into a governing habit that outlasts its justification. When wartime adjustment erodes accountability, the constitutional line does not just blur – it starts to slip. And it will be harder to restore when the emergency is over than it will be to defend it.
So, if elections cannot be held now because of the ongoing war, remedies are urgently needed to bolster the workings of democracy, accountability and transparency in the ways foreseen in Ukraine’s Constitution.
The author is completing a book examining Ukraine’s first 35 years of modern independent statehood, provisionally titled “Indomitable Ukraine 1991-2026: The Reemergence of a European Nation.”