MOSCOW, June 3. /TASS/. Following the death of parliamentarian Sergey Shvets, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada now has 399 members, the lowest number in its history, Ukrainian lawmaker Yaroslav Zheleznyak said.

"The session’s chairman announced the death of our colleague Sergey Shvets due to grave illness. <...> As he represented a single-mandate district, the number of legislators will remain at 399," Zheleznyak wrote on his Telegram channel. On May 28, it was announced that TV host and journalist Shvets had died of cancer.

Elections to the Rada follow a mixed system, using party lists and single-mandate districts. In the event of a delegate’s death or resignation, the party chooses a replacement if the legislator was elected via party lists. If a single-mandate delegate leaves the parliament, his seat remains vacant until the next election.

Shvets is the second Rada member to die in recent months, as Vladimir Moroz also passed in April. His seat will also remain vacant until the end of the current parliament’s term, as in 2019, he was elected from the part of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) controlled by the Kiev regime at the time.

According to the Ukrainian constitution, the Verkhovna Rada is comprised of 450 delegates. However, following the 2014 state coup, the actual number of lawmakers went down because the elections were not held on Donbass territories not under the Kiev regime’s control, nor in Crimea which reunited with Russia following a referendum. Thus, following the 2019 election campaign, the Rada numbered 424 delegates.

In 2022, following a ban on a number of opposition parties in Ukraine proclaimed "pro-Russian" by authorities and criminal proceedings launched against some lawmakers, the number of Rada delegates fell again. Many left the country and resigned. In January 2024, David Arakhamia, leader of the ruling Servant of the People faction in Ukraine’s parliament, said that the Verkhovna Rada was on the brink of a crisis as a substantial number of delegates were planning to vacate their seats.