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The constitution stipulates that parliamentary elections should take place no later than Oct. 29 and presidential elections early next year. However, in an interview with The Washington Post in May, Zelensky said: “If we have martial law, we cannot have elections. … If there is no martial law, then there will be [elections].”
While many countries manage to hold elections during wartime, Ukrainian officials say this is impossible, given that the country is fighting for its existence, with roughly 20 percent of it occupied by Russian forces and millions of people displaced. That democracy continues to function is an accomplishment in itself, they say.
Zelensky and his administration have said that Ukraine, which is officially designated as a candidate country to join the European Union, should become a member as soon as possible. E.U. officials say the process could take years.
Ukraine’s military general staff said in a Facebook post Thursday that Russian forces had launched eight missiles, 82 airstrikes and 76 multiple rocket launcher attacks the previous day against Ukrainian troops and various settlements across the Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson regions.
The bombardment continued into Thursday morning, with local officials reporting shelling in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region and near the city of Kupyansk, where there is heavy fighting.
On Thursday, the Joseph Schulte, a container ship carrying Ukrainian agriculture products despite Russian threats to obstruct its journey, continued sailing through the Black Sea to deliver its cargo to international markets.
Last month, Russia suspended an agreement brokered by the United Nations that allowed Ukraine to safely export grain and other agricultural products — a key part of its economy — through the Black Sea. Moscow officials warned that ships traveling from Ukrainian ports would be viewed as potentially carrying military cargo, making them targets.
The Joseph Schulte, which is flying a Hong Kong flag, departed from the southern Ukrainian port of Odessa on Wednesday, Ukrainian officials said. A tracking map on the MarineTraffic website showed the vessel entering Turkish waters Thursday evening and said it would reach the Turkish port of Ambarli at around midnight, local time.
In a statement on its website Wednesday, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, which co-owns the vessel, said that all crew onboard were “safe on board and well” and that the ship was using an “established corridor … via territorial waters of Ukraine, Romania, and [Turkey] to allow for a safe passage of southbound vessels.”
Meanwhile, a Russian court on Thursday imposed a fine of 3 million rubles, roughly $32,000, on the U.S. technology company Google, accusing it of failing to delete false information about the war in Ukraine, which Moscow calls a “special military operation.”
The court found that YouTube, the video site owned by Google, had not removed videos containing what magistrates labeled as “fake” information about the conflict. Since the invasion, the Kremlin has introduced sweeping censorship laws, which have included outlawing any criticism of the military.
Thursday’s action follows similar cases earlier this month against tech giant Apple and the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, an open-source online encyclopedia. A number of sites are under scrutiny by Moscow for failing to remove content that Russia deems illegal. Reddit, a social media site, was fined Tuesday.
Boris Obnosov, the head of the Russian-owned Tactical Missiles Corporation, along with his daughter and son-in-law, have been put on the Czech Republic’s sanctions list, following a campaign by Russian anti-corruption activists. Tactical Missiles produces missiles and aerial bombs that have been destroying Ukrainian cities for more than a year.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, after which many Russian figures linked to the Kremlin and directing the invasion were put on international sanctions lists, Obnosov’s daughter Olga and son-in-law Rostislav Zorikov continued to live in Prague, the Czech capital, where they and other family members reportedly own real estate worth more than $8 million.
In May, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation published an investigation into Obnosov’s family and urged the E.U. to put them on sanctions lists. Last month, 15 members of the European Parliament also urged the European Commission to impose sanctions on Obnosov’s close family members.
“Some people asked why investigations are necessary, since they have no effect on anything. However, now the villains living in the center of Europe with Putin’s bloody money will go away,” the Anti-Corruption Foundation wrote in a statement Thursday. “This is our common great victory and a good example of how sanctions should work.”
Serhiy Morgunov in Stuttgart, Germany, contributed to this report.
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