President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this weekend that his former defense minister was wrong to call for national elections and that holding a vote in the middle of war could divide Ukraine.
“Elections right now would be a tsunami for the state that would split Ukraine apart,” he said. Without a cease-fire, which Russia would not agree to, holding elections carried “major risks,” Mr. Zelensky said.
His comments came after the former defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who was fired by Mr. Zelensky in July, called last week for wartime elections. Mr. Zelensky said he thought Mr. Fedorov was being pushed by people around him in the wrong direction.
Mr. Zelensky has faced mounting political crises in recent weeks, after a clash between his defense minister and his army commander over how to run the war led him to replace both.
Mr. Fedorov has demanded to be reinstated, and this weekend, he repeated his call for Mr. Zelensky to hold national elections, in a challenge to his leadership.
A growing corruption scandal is also swirling around Mr. Zelensky as members of the presidential office have been accused of embezzlement of state property and funds.
But in a meeting on Saturday with reporters at the presidential palace in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, Mr. Zelensky seemed confident he could weather the crisis.
For the first time with journalists, he spoke in detail about the clash between Mr. Fedorov and the army commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, and how he faced having to fire them. A selection of Mr. Zelensky’s comments was approved for publication by his office on Sunday morning.
“My strategy is to lead the country to the end of the war and preserve an independent and sovereign state,” Mr. Zelensky said. “And I am carrying that out.”
As he prepared to welcome Western leaders to celebrate Ukraine’s independence day on Monday, Mr. Zelensky said this weekend that he was more concerned about the state of the war and Ukraine’s ability to counter multiple threats from Russia.
Ukraine has a $57 billion hole in its annual budget, he said, and a shortage of air-defense interceptors to protect it against a growing number of ballistic missile attacks. The country is also facing the prospect of Russia mobilizing additional troops in the coming months, he said.
Civilian casualties in Ukraine have increased drastically in 2026, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in a report released on Saturday. There have been at least 12,477 civilian casualties — 1,839 people killed and 10,638 injured — so far this year, it said, a 44 percent increase from the same period last year.
On Friday, a Russian double-tap drone attack on a shopping center in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, killed at least 16 people and injured more than 120, according to Ukrainian authorities, the U.N. report said, calling it a “breach of international humanitarian law.”
The two strikes came 30 minutes apart, suggesting that the shopping center had been the intended target, and occurred at a time when it was operational and full of people, the report said. U.N. officials visited the site on Saturday and interviewed survivors, who said they had seen no evidence of any military presence or equipment at the site, the report said.
The report quoted an employee of a shop, who said: “People were lying on the floor, bleeding and screaming, others were running away. There were so many people injured around. I saw two young girls, covered in blood.”