KIEV, Ukraine — The country is on the cliff of bankruptcy. A spate of politically motivated killings and mysterious suicides of former government officials has sown fear in the capital. Infighting has begun to splinter the pro-European majority coalition in Parliament. And a constant threat of war lingers along the Russian border.

A year after the election of Petro O. Poroshenko as president to replace the ousted Viktor F. Yanukovych, and six months after the swearing in of a new legislature, Ukraine remains deeply mired in political and economic chaos.

“Poroshenko, whether you like him or not, he’s not delivering,” said Bruce P. Jackson, the president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, an American nonprofit group. “The Ukrainian government is so weak and fragile that it is too weak to do the necessary things to build a unified and independent state.”

Efforts to forge a political settlement between the government in Kiev and Russian-backed separatists who control much of the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk have hit a deadlock over procedural disputes, despite a cease-fire in February calling for decentralization of power and greater local autonomy as the linchpins of a long-term accord.