The Ukrainian presidential election is less than a month away. To say there's worldwide anticipation would be an understatement. U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt has called it "the most important election in the history of independent Ukraine." The U.S. is sending $11.4 million to Ukraine for the sole purpose of ensuring the integrity of the vote, while Russia is doing everything it can to drum up enough unrest to thwart it—despite the fact that 85 percent of Ukrainians say they plan on going to the polls. But the truth is that a successful presidential election is, as Kennan Institute Director Matthew Rojansky put it, “an almost irrelevant question” when it comes to stopping the crisis. Come May 26, Ukraine could be in an even worse position than it is now.

There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that the elections won’t do anything to change the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, where deep divisions between the ruling parties and opposition have been obstructing lawmaking and constitutional reform. In the last month alone, the Rada has seen protests, brawls, and what interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk called a "coup d'etat.” The presidential election, Rojansky says, “doesn’t do anything for the government, which is a parliamentary system. It doesn’t give us a new Rada, it really doesn't solve any of those problems.”

Current members of the Rada have been in office since October 2012, well before former President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown, and the next parliamentary elections aren’t scheduled until 2017. Once a new president is elected, he or she will have the power to dissolve parliament and call for a new election. Petro Poroshenko, the leading candidate, has said he might do exactly that. But even if he does, the parliamentary election will probably be just as logistically fraught as the presidential one. “The separatists announced that they would persecute people who were voting. So the better question is, how many people can risk their health, their lives, to take part in the elections,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, chair of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties and a EuroMaidan activist.

“Presidential elections aren’t as important now as what civil society does, and parliamentary elections will hopefully come next, because the parliament is still the same—[it’s] the same parliament that voted for all of the laws we’ve seen over the past few months, especially the ones in January,” Maksym Butkevych, a former Ukrainian journalist and EuroMaidan activist, told me, referencing the January laws passed under Yanukovych that banned virtually all forms of public protest. Facing waves of criticism at home and abroad, the Rada later overturned the draconian measures. “These people don’t represent the will of the population or anything, they represent the survival instinct, which is maybe good for them, but not for the country,” Butkevych said.

The second, and more obvious reason why the upcoming presidential election will be no bellwether of change for Ukraine is that all of the candidates running for election, especially the likely winner, have deep ties to the endemic corruption that defined the Yanukovych administration and unravelled Ukraine’s state institutions. Of the 23 candidates registered, there are only a handful of serious contenders, and only two—Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko—are polling in the double-digits.