Ukrainian lawmaker missed two years of parliamentary votes. No, he didn’t lose his seat   

UKRAINE, Nov. 12 — On Nov. 9, Oleksandr Kunytskyi, a lawmaker from Kharkiv, participated in parliamentary voting in Verkhovna Rada for the first time since 2024. Two years ago, on Sept. 19, Kunytskyi made his last vote. Shortly after that, he traveled first to Israel and later reunited with his family in the United States. 

In 2019, Kunytskyi was elected to Verkhovna Rada as deputy of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party Servant of the People. He retained his seat, place in the party’s faction, and even his membership on the legislature’s law committee. All attempts to remove Kunytskyi from the committee have failed.

Ukrainian law, at the same time, provides no straightforward mechanism for stripping a lawmaker of their seat for failing to attend parliamentary sessions. 

Not enough to lose mandate 

Kunytskyi’s absence quickly became controversial. Back in 2024, he publicly suggested that he wouldn’t return to Ukraine until the police officers, with whom he had a confrontation, were held accountable. 

He was talking about the incident from 2022, when police officers detained him at a checkpoint for filming it, which is prohibited in Ukraine during the martial law. Kunytskyi accused police leadership for deliberate persecution of him. Yevhenii Zhukov, head of the patrol police department, said that Kunytskyi treats police officers with contempt, calling Zhukov’s subordinates “monkeys.”  

Article 81 of Ukraine’s Constitution says that lawmakers may lose their mandates before the next elections under specific circumstances. These include resignation, a new criminal conviction, and loss of Ukrainian citizenship with permanent relocation abroad. Not attending parliamentary sessions does not meet this criteria. 

Pavlo Romaniuk, a legal adviser to OPORA, Ukrainian election monitoring organization, told Gwara that being outside of Ukraine [even for two years] isn’t automatically treated as permanent relocation. 

Authorities would need to find and provide significant evidence that a deputy had moved abroad permanently. Only after that, constitutional grounds for accusation could be applied. 

Parliament attempts to expel Kunytskyi

In 2025, the governing Servant of the People party along with opposition parties’ members introduced the resolution seeking to remove Kunytskyi from the legislature’s law committee. But when the resolution fell four votes short of the required majority. 

The same year, in conversation with Gwara, David Arakhamia, the head of the Servant of the People faction, said that despite his support of the measure, the failure may be tied to the inclusion of other changes to parliamentary committee membership. 

At the same time, Yulia Onyshenko, an analyst with the CHESNO, Ukrainian civic society movement, told Gwara that the votes on disciplinary measures for MPs sometimes fail because some lawmakers are also absent or simply don’t want to be responsible for politically “sensitive” decisions. 

She also said that Verkhovna Rada would not sweep Kunytskyi from his seat by excluding from the parliamentary faction. He was elected directly by voters in a single-member district, so he would retain his mandate even without membership in the Servant of the People faction. 

Arakahmia also added that the lawmakers were used to the absence of Kunytskyi, so it has not prevented the committee from making any decisions. He also confirmed to Gwara that there were no plans to expel Kunytskyi from the parliamentary faction. The situation had not changed by 2026, and Kuyntskyi returned to the parliament facing no consequences of his absences, at least for now.   

The consequences of absences 

Even though the legal consequences for failing MPs’ duties are limited, Ukrainian law still requires MPs to attend parliament sessions and participate in the work of their committees. 

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the rules of Verkhovna Rada provided fines related to attendance and participating in voting. Some of these provisions were subsequently suspended under martial law.

Though, it doesn’t mean that Kunytskyi automatically continued to receive his salary. The information previously provided by the Verkhovna Rada’s administration showed that he was not paid between Sept. 21 and Dec. 31, 2024, because he had no recorded working time. 

But the Kunytskyi case hasn’t sparked a brand new discussion. In 2019, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court examined the proposal that would have allowed lawmakers to lose their seats for missing at least one-third of parliamentary or committee meetings without valid reasons. The court rejected those proposals as disproportionate. The court pointed out that less severe measures should be used to ensure parliamentary discipline.  

At the same, the Kunytskyi case is not the only example of a Ukrainian lawmaker remaining abroad while being in charge of governmental positions. 

Andrii Odarchenko, another former Kharkiv lawmaker, fled Ukraine like Kunytskyi. But, unlike his colleague, Odarchenko was removed from a parliamentary committee in 2024. Then he lost his mandate in November 2025 after he was charged with bribery. 

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