When I first met Sergii Leshchenko, in the spring of 2016, he and I spoke among the creaky parquet and colonnaded halls of the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. Leshchenko, who was then thirty-six, had been a member of parliament for two years, where he was often a novel—and for his many adversaries unwelcome—presence. In 2014, after years working as an investigative journalist, he decided to enter politics, following the Maidan revolution, which had swept away Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s former President and a figurehead for a grotesquely corrupt system, making way for a new generation of politicians inclined to pursue democratic reforms.

That summer, I wrote a story for The New Yorker on the journey of Leshchenko, along with his friend and fellow-journalist, Mustafa Nayyem, and their close ally, Svitlana Zalishchuk, describing their transition from the world of journalism and activism to the realm of post-revolutionary politics. In the months after Maidan, they chose to hitch a ride on what Leshchenko called the “tramway” of the party launched by Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch and political chameleon who was elected President in May, 2014. Joining Poroshenko’s party list was a way into parliament for the three reformers, but, once there, they quickly soured on his rule, which they felt mirrored the very kleptocratic politics that the revolution had sought to overcome. “Poroshenko played a small game,” Nayyem told me at the time. “It’s not worthy of the kind of leader we wanted to see after Maidan.”

As deputies, Leshchenko, Nayyem, and Zalishchuk added their votes to some reforms but more often found themselves battling figures from the country’s old guard, politicians who relied on a culture of backroom deals and favor-trading, and didn’t much welcome the arrival of those who would disrupt this system. Beyond the three of them, there were another couple dozen young deputies in parliament with similar ambitions—a loose coalition of self-described “Euro-optimists”—but the fledgling group was unable to translate their shared values into a movement or party of their own. They lacked money, organizational muscle, and access to national television; the inevitable clashing of egos and personal ambitions didn’t help, either.

Still, they represented a new model for what politics could be in Ukraine. “The usual image of a Ukrainian member of parliament is a guy with a big belly and a lot of money, sitting in the Rada deciding people’s destinies,” Zalishchuk told me in 2016. “But Sergii and Mustafa are two young, stylish guys—hipsters—who are the antithesis of the old style of Ukrainian politics.”

Earlier this month, in Kiev, I met up with Leshchenko at a park in the city’s Podil neighborhood, where he was holding one of his regular campaign stops, which are essentially meetings with local voters. As Leshchenko listened, they bemoaned the condition of Ukraine’s roads, courts, health-care system, and the other myriad arms of the state that have reliably disappointed them over successive political regimes. Leshchenko is again running for a seat in the Rada—parliamentary elections will be held this Sunday—but this time as an Independent, fighting alone for his political life in a “single-mandate” district, instead of as a member of a party list, as he did five years ago.

These days, the Ukrainian political landscape looks completely different, primarily thanks to the unexpected and triumphant rise of Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and actor who parlayed his popularity on “Servant of the People,” a television series in which he plays an everyman turned President, into the real thing. This April, Zelsenky defeated Poroshenko to win the Presidency with seventy-three per cent of the vote. Fed up and desperate, the country’s electorate was eager to sweep away the existing political caste and make a bet on Zelensky, whose status as an outsider was his greatest advantage.

But that mood has also seemingly swept away the would-be assemblage of reformers that includes Leshchenko. Zelensky’s party, also named Servant of the People, declared it would not place any current parliamentary deputies on its party list. That was doubly ironic in Leschenko’s case, given that he was an early supporter of the comedian turned President. When we spoke, Leshchenko called the decision of Zelensky’s party to exclude incumbents “certainly understandable for P.R. reasons,” but added that there was “something unjust about it, this suggestion that we’re all automatically guilty of something.”

When we met, Leshchenko was sober about the current political reality and his own place in it. He considered his first term in parliament a success—even if that success led to a far different outcome for him personally than he had imagined. “Our mission was to bring a new generation to politics,” he told me. “But, then, when this new generation showed up and fully took power, it turned out it wasn’t us, but Zelensky.”

Leshchenko, along with Nayyem and Zalishchuk and their allies, had helped shift Ukraine’s collective political imagination, but those efforts left them partially sidelined. “Yes, in a way it’s unfortunate that this niche was filled by other people, but I’d like to think that we were a part of this historic process all the same,” Leschenko told me. By now he is the political veteran, and others play the role of the upstarts. “We can’t represent ourselves as fresh air if we didn’t spend the last five years under the dome of the Rada,” he said. “But, then again, serving as fresh air is not the only positive role one can play.”

At the meeting with local voters, Leshchenko sat in faded gazebo tucked in the middle of the park. A dozen or so constituents had shown up. One asked about the terrible state of the nearby Kyrylivska Street, which had been recently renamed as part of a post-Maidan “decommunization” drive—it was previously known as Frunze Street, in honor of Mikhail Frunze, the Bolshevik revolutionary. It was a rutted mess, full of potholes and loose gravel. Leshchenko said that renaming the street was all well and good, but it was a cruel joke when compared with the fact that the road, like many others in Ukraine, hadn’t been properly repaired in the nearly thirty years since the end of Communism. Another person shouted about the number of criminal cases launched against high-ranking politicians that magically fall apart when they reach court.

A woman in the crowd suggested that Leshchenko walk across the street and take a look at her building, a five-story, government-owned brick apartment building constructed in the early nineteen-sixties. Near her entryway, she showed him a metal sewage pipe hanging off the exterior wall, its spigot aimed in the direction of the muddy courtyard. “Excuse me for the expression, but the building is swimming in shit,” she told him.

At another entryway, residents pointed out a small recessed area under the stairwell that, during periods of heavy rain or increased humidity, pools with moisture and fills the apartments above with the overpowering smell of dank mold. To let in fresh air, residents leave their windows open for days on end, even in the middle of winter, when temperatures regularly hit well below zero. Some years ago, with great fanfare, the government had swapped out their old windows and installed new, energy-efficient ones as part of program to cut down heating costs—an initiative that was rendered useless by the need to keep them open in freezing temperatures. Leshchenko listened to the complaints and suggested that while he still has his parliamentary mandate—even if he loses he’ll be a deputy through the end of the summer—the building’s residents should write him an official appeal, which he would then use to pressure the relevant government organs into addressing the problem.