After weeks of intense political deliberation, Ukraine has a new government in place. The Ukrainian parliament voted in Volodymyr Groysman as the country's new prime minister on April 14, replacing embattled Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk following his April 10 resignation. The appointment will mark a pause in the political infighting that has characterized Kiev for months. However, instability and uncertainty will continue as the government struggles to implement reforms and weather the intense competition between Russia and the West.

Groysman is the former speaker of Ukraine's parliament and a loyal ally of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. He takes his post some two years into the tenure of the government that replaced that of former President Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted in massive Euromaidan protests. The pro-West government has been beset by internal turmoil, and Groysman has pledged to speed up reforms derailed by infighting and by the intense opposition to Yatsenyuk's rule. The new prime minister will focus on restarting stalled talks with the International Monetary Fund for a $17 billion bailout package and, to that end, has appointed former senior consultant at McKinsey & Company Oleksandr Danyliuk as finance minister, replacing Natalie Jaresko. Danyliuk will lead negotiations with the IMF.

But Groysman's government will find it difficult to achieve its objectives. Support for his ruling coalition is weak in parliament: Only 257 of 450 lawmakers voted in favor of his appointment. Even this total was difficult to achieve, resting largely on the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and Yatsenyuk's People's Front with a few independents and lawmakers from oligarch-linked parties. Several parties rejected Groysman outright, including Fatherland, Self Help and the Radical Party, all of which have left the ruling coalition for the opposition over the past year. These parties will continue to challenge the new government and criticize Poroshenko, which may mean early elections later this year or at the beginning of 2017.

Conflict in eastern Ukraine will continue to be the key issue in Ukrainian politics, and talks between Kiev, Moscow and the West have yielded little progress in reintegrating the breakaway territories into the Ukrainian state. The unstable political situation in Kiev will make these negotiations even more difficult because the government is less likely to implement the controversial political requirements of the Minsk agreement at such a sensitive time. This reluctance could cause Russia and its separatist allies to balk at major concessions on the corresponding security components. The new government in Ukraine will put an end to political gridlock in the near term, but it will still be subject to the broader pressures that challenge Ukrainian stability.