How power in Ukraine keeps moving between president and parliament

How Ukraine wrote its constitution

For five years after the independence referendum of December 1991, Ukraine was governed under the constitution the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic had adopted in 1978, amended in pieces. A parliamentary commission was named to draft a replacement soon after independence, alongside the adoption of a multi-party system and legislative guarantees of civil and political rights for national minorities. The document that commission produced was adopted at the fifth session of the Verkhovna Rada on 28 June 1996, carried by 315 of the 450 possible votes against a minimum of 300. The anniversary has been a public holiday since.

Article 1 establishes Ukraine as a sovereign and independent, democratic, social, law-based state. Article 5 makes the people the bearer of sovereignty and the sole source of power, exercised directly and through state and local government, and forbids anyone to usurp state power. Article 15 requires that social life rest on political, economic and ideological diversity, recognises no ideology as mandatory, and prohibits censorship outright. Article 35 bars the state from treating any religion as mandatory and separates religious organisations from the state, though those organisations register with local and central authorities. Article 10 makes Ukrainian the sole official state language, a provision that sits against the widespread use of Russian in Crimea and in parts of the east. A law of 1991 guarantees ethnic minorities schools, educational buildings, cultural facilities and the use of their languages in personal business.

Two features of the text explain most of what has since happened to it. The right to amend it belongs exclusively to parliament, under a special legislative procedure. The only body that may interpret it, and decide whether a law conforms to it, is the Constitutional Court of Ukraine. The balance of power inside the state can therefore be moved by a vote in one chamber, or removed by a ruling of one court, and both have happened.

Why the balance kept moving

The presidential election of 2004 produced the first reversal. Leonid Kuchma had announced that he would not stand again, and the runoff was officially won by the incumbent prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, by a narrow margin. The opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, and his supporters alleged vote rigging and intimidation, above all in eastern Ukraine. Mass street protests followed in Kyiv and other cities, and the Supreme Court of Ukraine declared the result null and void. A repeat runoff went to Yushchenko. The constitutional amendments agreed on 8 December 2004 were part of the same settlement: a consociational bargain that converted the system into one in which the president had to cohabit with a powerful prime minister. They took force between January and May 2006.

In October 2010 the Constitutional Court declared those amendments unconstitutional, and the 1996 text returned with them struck out. On 18 November 2010 the Venice Commission published an opinion on that judgment. It considered it "highly unusual that far-reaching constitutional amendments, including the change of the political system of the country, are declared unconstitutional by a decision of the Constitutional Court after a period of 6 years", and added that "as Constitutional Courts are bound by the Constitution and do not stand above it, such decisions raise important questions of democratic legitimacy and the rule of law".

The third reversal took one sitting. On 21 February 2014, in the closing days of the Euromaidan protests, parliament passed a law reinstating the December 2004 amendments. It went through under a simplified procedure with no decision from the relevant committee, and cleared its first and second readings in a single vote, carried by 386 deputies: 140 from the Party of Regions, 89 from Batkivshchyna, 40 from UDAR, 32 Communists and 50 independents. Radio Free Europe reported that the measure was never signed by the president then in office, whom parliament removed days afterwards.

Two later amendments changed what the constitution is for. On 7 February 2019 the Rada voted to write the strategic course of membership of the European Union and of NATO into the preamble, three articles and the transitional provisions, and the change took effect on 21 February that year. On 3 September 2019 parliament abolished its own members' immunity, keeping it only for votes cast and statements made in the chamber and leaving deputies liable for insult and defamation. That revision came into force on 1 January 2020.

What the Verkhovna Rada actually does

The Verkhovna Rada is a single chamber of 450 members elected for five-year terms. It initiates legislation, ratifies international agreements and approves the budget, and it carries the main responsibility for forming the executive. The president nominates a prime minister who must be confirmed by parliament, and under Article 114 the cabinet is appointed by parliament on the submission of the president and the prime minister. The president keeps the right to nominate the ministers of foreign affairs and of defence for parliamentary approval, and appoints the prosecutor general and the head of the Security Service.

Party membership sits below 1% of the population eligible to vote, against an average of 4.7% across the European Union. Ukrainian parties tend to carry no clear-cut ideology. They cluster around civilisational and geostrategic orientation, around personalities and around business interests, and the economic left-right argument organises them less than it organises parties further west. For most of the period since independence, the first of those axes has been the deeper one: the first two presidents, Leonid Kravchuk and Kuchma, balanced the competing visions of the country's direction, while Yushchenko and Yanukovych stood plainly on opposite sides of it.

A single party has held an outright majority in the chamber once. In the early parliamentary election of 21 July 2019 the newly formed Servant of the People took 248 seats, the first absolute majority for one party in the history of independent Ukraine, and it formed a government on 29 August 2019 without assembling a coalition. That government lasted six months. The Rada dismissed it on 4 March 2020 after gross domestic product fell 1.5%, against the 4.5% rise projected when the cabinet took office.

How Ukrainians elect their parliament

The rules for filling those seats have changed nearly as often as the constitutional balance above them. Before 2006, half the chamber was elected by proportional representation from party lists and half in single-seat constituencies. In the elections of 2006 and 2007 the whole chamber was elected by party-list proportional representation. In 2012 the parallel system returned. The Electoral Code adopted in 2019 provides for every member to be elected on open party lists, which allows a voter to mark a candidate inside a list.

The president is elected by popular vote for a five-year term, in two rounds where no candidate takes a majority in the first. The presidential election of 2010 was decided in a second round by 48% to 45%, and the one of 2019 also went to a second round, held on 21 April.

Who governs the oblasts and the cities

The constitution defines Ukraine as a unitary state, with a single legal and administrative regime applying to every unit. Counting the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol, annexed by Russia in 2014 in an act Ukraine and most states do not recognise, the country has 27 regions: 24 oblasts, one autonomous republic, and two cities of special status, Kyiv and Sevastopol. The oblasts and Crimea divide into raions and cities of regional significance, and the pattern of these divisions is inherited from Soviet Ukraine. Populated places are classed as urban or rural, with urban ones split further into cities and urban-type settlements, an administrative category invented under Soviet rule.

Local self-government is guaranteed. Local councils and city mayors are popularly elected and control local budgets. Regional and district administrators reach office by a different route: the president appoints and dismisses them, on proposals from the prime minister, and they serve as representatives of the central government in Kyiv while governing over the locally elected assemblies beneath them.

That arrangement feeds back into the argument of this article. Where one office appoints every regional administrator in the country, control of that office is what regional elites compete for, and the competition runs through the centre instead of through the regions. The politics of Ukraine has been described as encouraging exactly that: fierce competition among regional elites for control of the central government and of the presidency.

Where Crimea sits in the constitutional order

Crimea belonged to Russia from 1783 until 1954, when the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet adopted a resolution on 19 February transferring the Crimean oblast from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian one. The transfer was carried out under Article 18 of the 1936 Soviet constitution, which required a union republic's consent to any change of its territory, and both republic parliaments recorded that consent. It was announced in the Soviet press eight days later, with no further explanation offered then or for the rest of the Soviet period.

Crimea held oblast status inside Soviet Ukraine for 37 years. In early 1991, after a referendum in the Ukrainian SSR and a resolution of its parliament a month later, its status was raised to that of an autonomous republic, and it kept that designation once the Soviet Union broke apart. In 1992 several pro-Russian organisations on the peninsula argued for secession and annexation by Russia. In July 1992 the Crimean and Ukrainian parliaments determined that Crimea would remain under Ukrainian jurisdiction while holding substantial cultural and economic autonomy, which is how the Autonomous Republic of Crimea came about.

Russia accepted Ukraine's 1991 borders expressly, in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha accords of December 1991 and again in the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994, an agreement covered in Ukraine: history. Russian forces entered Crimea in February 2014. A referendum held the following month under military occupation was reported as returning 97% in favour of joining Russia, and was denounced as illegal by the European Union and the United States. Russia and the self-proclaimed Republic of Crimea signed a treaty of accession on 18 March 2014. The United Nations General Assembly then adopted non-binding resolution 68/262, which declared the referendum invalid and supported Ukraine's claim to the peninsula. Russia administers Crimea and Sevastopol as two federal subjects. Ukraine and most other states do not recognise the annexation, and acts of the Crimean parliament remain among those the Constitutional Court of Ukraine may nullify.

How the courts and the prosecutors work

Constitutional jurisdiction belongs to one body. Laws, acts of parliament and of the cabinet, presidential decrees and acts of the Crimean parliament may be nullified by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine where they are found to violate the constitution, and other normative acts are subject to ordinary judicial review. The Supreme Court of Ukraine heads the system of courts of general jurisdiction, is regarded as independent and impartial, and has ruled against the government on several occasions.

The courts have held legal, financial and constitutional freedom guaranteed by Ukrainian law since 2002. Justices are appointed by presidential decree for an initial period of five years, after which parliament confirms them for life, and judges are well protected from dismissal except in cases of gross misconduct. The constitution provides for trial by jury, which has yet to be implemented, and some courts written into legislation exist only on paper, among them the Court of Appeals of Ukraine. Since 2010 proceedings may be conducted in Russian where both parties agree; before that they had to be held in Ukrainian, and a party who speaks neither language may use a native language or a translator.

The prosecution service is the sharper institutional problem. The Office of the Prosecutor General holds broad rights of control and supervision, wider than those of its counterparts in most European states, and the European Commission for Democracy through Law, the Council of Europe body known as the Venice Commission, has found that "the role and functions of the Prosecutor's Office is not in accordance with Council of Europe standards". The conviction rate runs above 99%, matching the rate recorded in the Soviet Union, and suspects are often held for long periods before trial. The criminal justice and prison systems remain punitive in character.

Freedom of speech and of the press are guaranteed by law, and authorities have at times applied various forms of pressure to news media. The failure of the government to conduct a thorough, credible and transparent investigation into the disappearance and murder of the independent journalist Georgiy Gongadze in 2000 is among the cases that damaged Ukraine's international standing on that point. In a poll taken by the Razumkov Centre in early October 2010, 56.6% of Ukrainians said they believed political censorship existed in the country.

What martial law froze in place

Martial law was declared when Russia invaded in February 2022, and it continues. Its constitutional effect is unusually wide. Article 157 prohibits any amendment to the constitution under martial law or a state of emergency, and elections, referendums, strikes, mass gatherings and protests are all prohibited while it is in force.

Every mechanism that has moved the balance of power since 1996 is therefore suspended at the same time. Parliament cannot amend the text. No election can return a different parliament or a different president. No referendum can be put. The mass street protest that preceded two of the four settlements above is unlawful. A document that changed four times in eighteen years, by four different instruments, is for the moment fixed.

Other assessments of the period are mixed and worth recording as such. The V-Dem Institute found ongoing democratic backsliding in Ukraine as of 2025, citing restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of association. A broad anti-corruption drive that began in early 2023 produced the resignations of several deputy ministers and regional heads during a government reshuffle. A Socis poll in 2026 found that the issues Ukrainians named most often were corruption, drone and missile attacks, and the standard of living. In June 2025 Ukraine legalised multiple citizenship, reversing a rule that had stood since independence.

Where Ukraine's alliances point now

Ukraine holds a seat at the United Nations that predates its independence. The Ukrainian SSR was one of the original members in 1945, admitted as part of a wartime compromise between the Soviet Union and the Western powers over the balance of the General Assembly, and it sat on the Security Council in 1948 and 1949 and again in 1984 and 1985. Independent Ukraine held a non-permanent seat from 1999 to 2001, and has contributed to UN peacekeeping operations since 1992. It joined what was then the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1992, together with the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, the Council of Europe on 9 November 1995, and the World Trade Organization on 16 May 2008.

The European Union relationship was built in stages over more than two decades. A Partnership and Cooperation Agreement entered into force in 1998. The Helsinki summit of December 1999 recognised Ukraine's long-term aspirations without opening the question of association. The Association Agreement was signed in 2014, in the months after Yanukovych fled the country; the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area it created entered into force in January 2016, and visa-free travel for Ukrainian citizens followed three years after the signature. Candidate status for membership was granted on 23 June 2022, four months into the full-scale invasion.

One membership was never taken up. Ukraine signed but never ratified accession to the Commonwealth of Independent States, so it was never formally a member; a decree of 19 May 2018 gave effect to a National Security and Defence Council decision terminating participation in the CIS statutory bodies, and by February 2019 that withdrawal was effectively complete. Two smaller formats replaced it. The Lublin Triangle was created in 2020 with Lithuania Lithuania and Poland Poland, and the Association Trio was formed in 2021 with Georgia Georgia and Moldova Moldova, both directed at European Union accession. The International Visegrad Fund, funded by Czechia, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia Slovakia, supports the same effort.

Ukraine has been the most active participant in NATO's Partnership for Peace programme, and every major party supports eventual European Union membership. Since February 2019 that destination has been written into the constitution itself, in the preamble, in three articles and in the transitional provisions. A foreign policy objective placed inside the constitution is beyond the reach of an ordinary parliamentary majority, and it now sits inside the one document that Article 157 has frozen for the duration of the war.