Donald Trump’s Oval Office bust-up with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the brief suspension of US military aid to Kyiv have strengthened the Ukrainian president’s domestic popularity, leaving his opponents in a quandary about how to challenge his leadership.
Ukrainians have rallied around their leader in the weeks since Trump questioned Zelenskyy’s democratic legitimacy, calling him a “dictator without elections” and tearing into him during a bruising encounter in the White House. Following that meeting, Trump allies in the US have called on Zelenskyy to quit.
“We may hate him. We may be harsh on him. But he’s our president,” said Olena Halushka of the International Centre for Ukrainian Victory, a Kyiv-based civil society organisation that advocates democratic reforms and postwar recovery.
Zelenskyy has since sought to patch up relations with Washington, accepting a minerals deal proposed by the Trump administration, as well as a 30-day truce on energy infrastructure attacks that Russia has agreed to.
Far from the 4 per cent approval rating Trump claimed Zelenskyy had dropped to, Ukrainians’ trust in their president jumped to 67 per cent in the week after the clash in the Oval Office, according to an opinion poll published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS). That score represents the highest since December 2023.
“People in Ukraine saw these events as a wider attack on the country, rather than just criticism targeting the president,” said KIIS executive director Anton Hrushevsky. Trump’s comments were seen as “unfair, a stab in the back, which is why it triggered a rallying effect around the president”.
But the boost to Zelenskyy’s popularity poses a dilemma for opposition groups that had been upping their criticism of the Ukrainian president earlier this year.
“It’s a bit of a stalemate situation right now,” says Volodymyr Fesenko, a Ukrainian political analyst based in Kyiv. “You can criticise Zelenskyy, but you can’t be seen as siding with Trump.”
Former president Petro Poroshenko and his allies have in recent weeks criticised Zelenskyy for his alleged poor handling of international matters and for imposing sanctions on Poroshenko last month.
Poroshenko told the German tabloid Bild earlier this week that Zelenskyy was “moving the nation towards a dictatorship”, describing the asset freeze and travel ban imposed on him as illegal. But he stopped short of endorsing Trump in calling Zelenskyy a dictator and suggesting he should be removed from office.
“It is not for Trump to decide who will lead Ukraine, that is a matter for the Ukrainian people,” Poroshenko said, adding that Zelenskyy had vowed to serve only one term when he ran for president in 2019.
Lawmaker Volodymyr Ariev, from Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party, wrote on social media after the Oval Office clash: “We’re now facing a choice between ‘very bad’ and ‘disaster’ again. And the government is fully responsible for this.”
Other, more radical opposition figures have had no qualms directly appealing to the US president. Oleksandr Dubinskiy, an MP arrested in November on charges of treason, earlier this month appeared in court sporting a Trump sweatshirt and directly thanking the US president on X. In late February, Dubinskiy said Ukraine was “under threat of turning into a new form of dictatorship”.
But when media reports claimed in early March that members from the teams of Poroshenko as well as former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko had been meeting with the Trump administration to discuss possible snap elections, both rushed to deny the allegations.
“There’s really nothing interesting here, no plot behind the scenes,” said Rostyslav Pavlenko, a lawmaker and Poroshenko ally. “Our message has always been the same, more weapons for Ukraine, more sanctions on Russia, and elections only after the war ends.”
Opinion polls have shown traditional opposition figures like Poroshenko or Tymoshenko trailing well behind Zelenskyy in terms of popularity, though previous surveys suggest former top military commander Valery Zaluzhny beating the Ukrainian president in a run-off. Zaluznhy has not said whether he would run in future elections.
Dmytro Razumkov, an MP and former campaign manager in Zelenskyy’s 2019 presidential run turned fierce critic of the Ukrainian president, told the Financial Times there should be no election until the end of the war’s “active phase”.
“It’s possible we’ll see it this year,” Razumkov said.
Elections have been suspended in Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022 and the introduction of martial law. The government and civil society organisations have since repeatedly pointed out that the threat of missile attacks, the problem of getting hundreds of thousands of troops and millions of Ukrainians abroad to vote as well as a swath of technical and logistical issues make free and fair elections impossible during a war.
“If the topic of elections became more actual, we could see some politicians trying to argue that they would be better able to talk with the US to end the war”, compared to Zelenskyy, said Fesenko, the political analyst. “There are politicians who want to head this way, but are also afraid of a false start . . . they see Zelenskyy’s level of support, and aren’t sure how to leverage the current situation.”
Whether Zelenskyy’s popularity bump will last will probably depend on the evolution of the relationship with the US as well as the outcome of the ceasefire talks. A second round of US-Russia talks is scheduled for Monday in Saudi Arabia.
“It’s a fragile situation because it very much depends on the current events,” Hrushevsky said. “When people see Zelenskyy resisting aggression, they trust him more; but when we have a more healthy relationship with partners, they start focusing more on internal issues.”
