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Why did Kyiv's parliament change its speaker?
Summary
A look back at the October 2021 removal of Dmytro Razumkov and the election of Ruslan Stefanchuk as head of the Verkhovna Rada.
What did it mean when Ukraine's parliament replaced its speaker within a few days? On 11 October 2021, the change at the top of the Verkhovna Rada was the freshest turn in Ukrainian politics, following votes on 7 and 8 October.
On 7 October 2021, the Verkhovna Rada voted to dismiss Dmytro Razumkov as speaker. As reported at the time, the dismissal followed his disagreements with President Volodymyr Zelensky and with the stance of the ruling Servant of the People party on legislation meant to reduce the influence of Ukrainian oligarchs.
On 8 October 2021, the chamber elected Ruslan Stefanchuk as its new speaker. The two votes, one day apart, settled the question of who would lead the chamber.
A parliament in its ninth convocation
The chamber that made the change was the 9th convocation of the Verkhovna Rada, which began its term on 29 August 2019 and meets in Kyiv. The speaker's dispute with the president and the governing party therefore played out in a parliament barely two years into its term, with the governing party able to act on the matter.
The stated reason is the point worth dwelling on. The disagreement concerned legislation aimed at curbing oligarchic influence, a subject on which the presidential camp and the speaker were reported to differ. A change of speaker was the outcome of that disagreement.
A separate signal from Brussels
On 6 October 2021, a different story had unfolded in the region. NATO expelled eight members of the Russian Mission to NATO, accusing them of secretly operating as intelligence officers, and cut the number of Russian positions at the organisation to 10. It was a separate matter from the Rada vote, but it was part of the same news cycle in which Ukraine and its neighbours were watched.
What the episode showed
The sequence showed how quickly the Rada could remove and replace its leadership when the governing party and the president wanted it to. Within two days, the speaker who had clashed with them over oligarch-related legislation was gone and a successor was in place.
