Tired, scared, or deliberately obstructive: Why Ukrainian lawmakers refuse to vote for reforms
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As Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada enters its seventh year without a general election, a troubling narrative has taken hold in Kyiv's political circles that parliament is broken, paralyzed, and incapable of delivering the reforms Ukraine's international partners require. MPs and governmental officials are giving two
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Opinion Tired, scared, or deliberately obstructive: Why Ukrainian lawmakers refuse to vote for reforms by Tetiana Shevchuk March 27, 2026 10:48 PM 4 min read President Volodymyr Zelensky arrives to speak to parliamentarians at the Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Oct. 16, 2024. (Press Service of the President of Ukraine / AP) Opinion Prefer on Google Tetiana Shevchuk International relations head at the Anti-Corruption Action Center As Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada enters its seventh year without a general election, a troubling narrative has taken hold in Kyiv's political circles that parliament is broken, paralyzed, and incapable of delivering the reforms Ukraine's international partners require. MPs and governmental officials are giving two explanations for this supposed dysfunction: personal exhaustion and fear of anti-corruption investigations . Neither holds up to scrutiny. The crisis may be real, but it originates not in the parliament chamber but in the President's Office. President Volodymyr Zelensky has the tools to resolve it and has chosen not to use them. The first narrative, that MPs have simply grown weary after years in office under martial law, without elections to renew their mandate, has a kernel of truth and a fatal flaw. Yes, there is a cohort of lawmakers who arrived in 2019 with reformist energy and now feel politically stranded, unable to leave and unwilling to engage. Collectively, that fatigue may be real. But in a country at war , the argument collapses the moment it is stated aloud. The soldiers in the trenches of the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk oblasts are the ones who are really tired, but they cannot stop fighting. Ukrainian MPs drawing state salaries, enjoying Kyiv offices, and holding institutional power are not entitled to cite exhaustion as grounds for legislative inaction. If anything, the wartime context makes the obligation to legislate more acute, not less. The more recent excuse is that MPs are paralysed by fear of prosecution. MPs...
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