Triangle of confusion: the government, the President's Office and parliament enter a new political season

On 1 September Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, set another record by opening its 16th session since it was convened in July 2019.

The Rada's agenda was very revealing, and the results of the votes in the first sitting days of autumn were even more so. The MPs began their work by considering bills that have been listed as benchmarks in various international support programmes.

The fact that parliament started off with this particular set of bills points to Ukraine's main problem: its huge budget deficit.

Over the past few weeks, the new Cabinet of Ministers has been actively lobbying for these bills, holding endless meetings and consultations with MPs, including some from the president's own Servant of the People faction.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy got involved as well. A few weeks earlier, at a meeting of the National Security and Defence Council (NSDC) where one of the main items on the agenda was funding for the armed forces, the new prime minister, Serhii Koretskyi, informed Zelenskyy of the real state of the budget deficit. NSDC members say the president was stunned – so much so that while the meeting was still going on, he telephoned the MPs responsible for the votes on the EU- and IMF-related legislation and started shouting and reprimanding them.

Yet even with that pressure from the very top, it still proved impossible to drum up more than 190 votes for the much-delayed bills.

This was a vivid illustration of the state of affairs within the authorities. The president's team is brilliant at putting on a show of unity and optimism at set-piece events such as prayer breakfasts with officials, celebrities and foreign guests, and National Legend ceremonies honouring soldiers, artists and Ukraine's international supporters. But it is going into the new political season with a President's Office and a president knocked off balance, a fragmented Rada, and a Cabinet still finding its feet.

In other words, all three of the centres that usually form Ukraine's triangle of power are entering the new season with serious problems of their own – or, figuratively speaking, their own dead ends.

As everyone knows, there are no dead ends in Euclidean geometry. But the formula of Ukrainian politics has long been reduced to calculating the sum of all the dead ends in which the authorities find themselves – and towards which they are leading the country.

The President and Office of suspicions

The topmost corner of Ukraine's triangle of power – and the one that has long been trying to widen its own angle of influence as far as possible – is President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Office. There is some irony here: in geometry, a very large angle is called obtuse.

On 1 September, Zelenskyy made his anger plain after MPs failed to pass several bills needed to unlock international funding.

"MPs also bear some of the responsibility to the people of Ukraine: around US$15 billion depends on their share of the work which has to be done… The Verkhovna Rada has failed to pass three bills that could have brought Ukraine more than US$4 billion. Another two bills – which have also failed – were part of the IMF programme. This is not money for the government or the opposition," the president thundered at MPs.

At first glance the situation might seem odd. After all, it's the president's own single-party majority that is officially responsible for everything in the Rada. People close to Zelenskyy, such as Davyd Arakhamiia, leader of the Servant of the People faction, have spent years convincing everyone of their virtuoso ability to play parliament like a piano.

But actually Zelenskyy's anger is not so much odd as symptomatic. The president now resembles a cart driver who's got stuck in the mud and is flogging his horse in the hope that a little more brutality will force a few final surges of energy out of it. The problem is that he drove the cart into the mire himself.

The fact is that the foreign policy and military situation around Ukraine is developing in a way that could hardly be further from what the president expected just a few months ago.

Since the summer, Zelenskyy himself has done everything he could to raise public expectations – and with them the expectations of the political class – to heights unseen since 2023 and the first counteroffensive.

The phrase "elections in November", which Zelenskyy first dropped casually into a conversation with his faction before the summer strikes on Crimea and then discussed seriously with his inner circle at a state residence near Kyiv, began to look entirely realistic in the upbeat media atmosphere whipped up by the President's Office.

Those expectations, among both the public and the political establishment, were further fuelled by much-trumpeted promises of "40 days to force Russia into peace" and the like.

But Ukraine is entering autumn in a very different military reality.

Across much of the country, back-to-school ceremonies on 1 September took place either in shelters or entirely remotely, with children joining online from different homes and cities.

Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv and other cities are enduring almost constant air-raid warnings and regular ballistic missile attacks which Ukraine simply does not have the resources to protect them from.

People can see the contrast between promises to "end the war by November" and rehearsals for the apocalypse in September, and between the government's regime of austerity for the country and the brazen attempt to launder UAH 150 million (about US$3.3 million) to get yet another government official released from pre-trial detention.

Previously, Zelenskyy has always managed to channel public discontent elsewhere. But after July's "cardboard Maidan" protests and yet another anti-corruption case – Forrest Gump – the accumulated negativity began to fall squarely on the president himself.

The protests in July and August and the controversy over the dismissal of Mykhailo Fedorov as defence minister have been near-disastrous for Zelenskyy politically. Firstly, a highly promising competitor has appeared in a vacant political niche. Secondly, the president himself is no longer even one of Ukraine's three most trusted politicians.

In first-round presidential polling, respondents still name Zelenskyy as the favourite. But no one can really calculate how many of them genuinely support the incumbent, and how many are naming him out of caution – "just in case, God forbid".

The modelling of second-round voting, where Zelenskyy clearly loses to Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Kyrylo Budanov and Mykhailo Fedorov, suggests there are quite a few people in the latter camp. If this trend continues, we could reach the point where even Petro Poroshenko could allow himself to dream of at least a faint chance of revenge for 2019.

And all these setbacks have a single root cause – Zelenskyy has finally lost the moral high ground he used to have over the former embezzlers and oligarchs. His party campaigned under the slogan "Let's get them together", but were Zelenskyy to resurrect that slogan now, he and most of his team would probably find themselves among the "THEM".

The situation in the President's Office is the clearest illustration of this point. Soon the only officials there untouched by criminal allegations may be the foreign policy people.

The case involving Iryna Mudra, deputy head of the President's Office, at the end of August was particularly telling. According to the version of events that investigators set out in the case materials, UAH 150 million (US$3.4 million) was laundered so that bail could be posted for former energy and justice minister Herman Halushchenko.

Kyrylo Budanov's name hasn't come up so far, and no procedural actions have been taken against the head of the President's Office.

But people who know how such decisions are made inside the Office point to Mudra's particularly close relationship with Budanov. It was he who persuaded her to stay at Bankova instead of taking up the position of justice minister in the government.

That is why many people within the system find it hard to imagine that Mudra could have got involved in such a sensitive matter independently, without at least tacit approval from the leader.

But it seems equally implausible that getting the long-forgotten Halushchenko out of pre-trial detention could have been an initiative of Budanov's.

According to media reports, Halushchenko had begun to show a willingness to cooperate with the anti-corruption agencies, and therefore potentially to reveal who the Energoatom money was actually being collected for, who the high-end Dynasty houses were being built for, and who "Vova" is on the tapes.

But Budanov has not been implicated in the schemes surrounding Energoatom and did not own a Dynasty property. Moreover, from a purely political perspective, it may even have benefited him if Halushchenko had named his patrons, as that could potentially clear the way for Budanov in future elections.

And so, in this and many other criminal allegations, one's gaze is inevitably directed over Budanov's head and comes to rest on a single point: the office on the fourth floor – the presidential floor.

And however hard Zelenskyy tries to persuade journalists off the record that he only finds out about corruption in the President's Office when he reads the news, even as accomplished an actor as he is can't really convince us that he believes that.

Every story like the one about Mudra makes the political vertical harder to control. People within the system are gradually realising that it's better not to carry out an illegal order and lose their job than to carry it out and lose their freedom.

Zelenskyy can bang his fist on the table at NSDC meetings, make angry calls to MPs and ministers and rant in his evening addresses all he likes.

But this is looking less and less like a demonstration of strength and an ability to investigate, punish or force someone to make the required decision, and more like the exact opposite of that.

Gradually, the entire toolkit that Zelenskyy still uses to have his decisions put into practice and legitimise his own will is shifting from the realm of political compromise into plain old coercion and control.

This is the origin of Bankova's obsession with maintaining influence over the Security Service of Ukraine, the State Bureau of Investigation and the Prosecutor General's Office.

When political tools become scarce, the value of coercive tools automatically goes up.

Government scare tactics

The second corner of the classic triangle of power is the Cabinet of Ministers.

At the moment it's still in the process of finding its real place within the new configuration.

Clearly, Zelenskyy still wants to be able to influence the government and shape its agenda unchallenged.

But the Cabinet's leadership understood right from the start that the president's wishes alone – as was the case under former prime minister Oleksii Honcharuk or the early days of Denys Shmyhal – would not be enough for successful governance.

That is why the new prime minister, Serhii Koretskyi, is making every effort to strengthen cooperation with MPs, encourage ministers to maintain constant communication with parliament, take part in government question times, attend committee meetings and get involved in other routine parliamentary work.

Unlike Yuliia Svyrydenko, who had been part of the ruling team almost from the outset, Koretskyi is a complete newcomer to the system.

And his arrival has already resulted in certain changes in the way the upper echelons of power operate.

First and foremost, these changes are noticeable even on a purely human level.

"Koretskyi is probably the most unemotional prime minister in all of Zelenskyy's presidency. Even Shmyhal sometimes looks like an excitable teenager next to him," one Servant of the People MP who frequently works with the PM says with a smile.

According to MPs, Koretskyi is extremely polite and constructive with everyone. But at the same time, he is equally cold and distant. Whether because he can't or won't, he does not try to build warm personal relationships.

He is a person who sets tasks and sees that they are carried out, and who apparently still does not fully understand why MPs can't be handled in that way.

According to Ukrainska Pravda's sources in the Servant of the People party, after taking charge of the country in mid-July, the prime minister immediately set about figuring out exactly what he would have to manage, what resources were at his disposal, and what needs he had to address.

"And it wasn't long before he was seriously shocked. What's more, Koretskyi didn't hide his shock and started laying out the truth to our MPs without pulling any punches. They're not used to that; the last time someone frightened them like that was Honcharuk at the start of the Covid-19 epidemic," one senior Servant of the People MP recalls of the events of August.

All through the last month of the summer, Koretskyi kept going to meetings at the President's Office and parliament, explaining things and presenting tables and charts. And those meetings left indelible impressions on a lot of MPs.

Ahead of a major NSDC meeting in mid-August, the prime minister prepared a highly revealing presentation for the president as well.

His slides vividly demonstrated the terrifying financial gap between the resources Ukraine currently has and the expenditure the state needs to cover by the end of the year: a shortfall measured in tens of billions of dollars.

Previously, the usually kind and smiling Yuliia Svyrydenko had tried not to stress people out too much and would explain complex financial problems as gently as possible. Koretskyi's presentation was a wake-up call for many in the government.

The new prime minister was banking on the idea that demonstrating the scale of the problem would convince parliament to take a constructive approach. In parallel with his "shock therapy", over the previous few weeks he had been persistently urging MPs to support bills furthering European integration and other legislation that would unlock international funding. The Verkhovna Rada put some of these bills to the vote as early as 1 September – and rejected almost all of them that same day.

As a result, Ukraine found itself facing the threat of losing a "quick" US$4-5 billion without any idea of how to make up the shortfall.

To the ministers and prime minister, the failure to pass the bills appears to be, if not outright sabotage, then at the very least acting against the interests of the government itself and the state. For Koretskyi, however, it could prove to be a very useful experience and his first hard lesson in an accelerated course in public administration.

The government can show MPs as many terrifying slides about holes in the budget as it likes, but it's parliament that ultimately votes on the legislation. And sometimes, whether you like it or not, you have to "listen to everyone" – especially when a crisis could be brewing, ready to hit this autumn.

The last grey eminence

The Verkhovna Rada is now operating with one eye on the new, and apparently the last, grey eminence in Volodymyr Zelenskyy's orbit.

Davyd Arakhamiia has become an indispensable figure in parliament, thanks to his ability to broker situational or relatively long-lasting coalitions there – especially after Andrii Yermak was pushed out of public politics after being named as a suspect by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), together with the associated protests and the negativity that had built up around him over the years.

Meanwhile, over the past month, Ukrainska Pravda has heard various iterations of the same story dozens of times in the corridors of parliament, government, the President's Office and law enforcement agencies: that Arakhamiia himself may soon be added to the anti-corruption bodies' list of suspects.

Arakhamiia himself is evidently relying on his ever-dependable negotiating abilities.

In particular, he is trying to maintain communication with people close to the anti-corruption agencies and secure the support of those who, though unlikely to be able to persuade the agencies to abandon procedural action against him, could at least convince them to delay it.

The argument is simple: the Verkhovna Rada must not be destabilised this autumn, when the situation in the country is already extraordinarily difficult.

It is also worth bearing in mind that Arakhamiia has a tacit agreement with Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who plays a key role in the procedure for bringing MPs to criminal prosecution. [In late 2025, Kravchenko reportedly refused to sign treason charges against Arakhamiia and several other MPs, earning himself powerful allies in parliament in return – ed.]

But either way, the political class is already looking, with certain reservations, at the prospect of Arakhamiia continuing to remain the undisputed leader and the main driving force behind the parliamentary process.

Because if Arakhamiia were to drop out of the equation for some reason, the Verkhovna Rada could, at least in the short term, descend into serious disarray.

There is simply no one else who has the authority and the communication skills to simultaneously hold together the remnants of the former Opposition Platform – For Life party, various parliamentary groups, single-mandate MPs, and the fundamentally opposing factions within Servant of the People itself.

Theoretically, if Arakhamiia were to run into trouble, as things stand today, the only person who could try to help stabilise parliament would be the speaker, Ruslan Stefanchuk.

The speaker may not command much authority in the current parliamentary set-up, but at least he has no outright antagonists, and he is the only one capable of making surprise moves such as dropping into Poroshenko's party office.

How comfortable Stefanchuk – a hermit-like lawmaker who has always tried to distance himself from the political bargaining, behind-the-scenes deals and horse-trading that go on – would feel being at the very epicentre of these processes, and how capable he would be of handling it, is another question.

There is no answer to this question yet, nor will there be until Stefanchuk actually finds himself in that situation. If, of course, it comes to that.

***

Meanwhile, the Rada continues its low-level sabotage of European integration legislation and unpopular bills on VAT on parcels or taxes for sole traders, in the hope of carving out some degree of quasi-autonomy in its dealings with the President's Office, while also trying to keep the government in line.

But all the parliamentary groups that are rebelling against what they call "external governance", "the anti-corruption dictatorship", or some other phenomenon from the book of political fears and superstitions, will sooner or later hit the ceiling of what such resistance can achieve.

Because the fact is that what they call "external governance" became part of Ukraine's domestic political reality long ago.

More than half of the budget is financed by international partners and donors. Their ability to influence the procedures for overseeing how these frankly phenomenal amounts of financial aid is spent is simply a matter of exercising operational control over their investments.

Without this money, Ukraine will clearly be unable either to fight the war or to function properly as a state. The new prime minister is a good person to ask about this – he's figured it out exceptionally well.

Ukraine will have to honour its international commitments, however unpleasant that may be for conservatives from the Yuliia Tymoshenko Bloc or single-mandate Servant of the People MPs from eastern and southern regions. Not for the sake of the weakened President's Office with its unelectable candidate, the government terrified by the scale of the problems, or the "evil Brussels bureaucracy", but for Ukraine.

Because tomorrow the government will put up another slide showing a budget shortfall of tens of billions of dollars. And the question about the limits of "sovereign democracy" will turn into the eternal Ukrainian question: where do we get the money from?

Roman Romaniuk, Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Ganna Bryedova, Yelyzaveta Khodatska and Anna Kybukevych

Edited by Teresa Pearce