Parliamentary crisis pushes Ukraine's IMF programme to the brink

UKRAINE - In Brief 17 Mar 2026 by Dmytro Boyarchuk

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Parliamentary crisis is in full swing. In our last report, "Though Russia's strategies keep failing, the war is far from over," we described how the IMF is struggling with its new program and that the outlook is not particularly encouraging. Today Bloomberg reported that the IMF is now openly raising the alarm that funding for the program may effectively never get off the ground, as parliament refuses to vote on anything the Cabinet proposes. Poorly conceived proposals in the taxation area are only part of the story. The bigger picture is that Volodymyr Zelenskyy has effectively lost the lion's share of his political shine — yet continues to behave as though nothing has changed. Zelenskyy and his hand-picked Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko have chosen the path of building a positive narrative around their actions: spreading helicopter money across various populist programmes, raising pensions, and the like. The dirty work — tax increases, dealing with mobilisation problems — they want someone else to handle. In the case of the IMF programme, Zelenskyy and the Cabinet want to be seen by society as the ones who give money to people, while offloading unpopular decisions onto MPs. Naturally, MPs have no desire to pull chestnuts out of the fire for a president who has never treated them as stakeholders worthy of serious consideration. Moreover, MPs can clearly see the collapse of Zelenskyy's party ratings and have no political future to speak of. A large number of them are now openly declaring their intention to resign rather than continue what they believe serves no purpose for them. Elections are needed, but there is no realistic way to hold them under conditions of perma...