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Kiev, Ukraine Amid deepening economic gloom, an unresolved civil war, and even warnings of imminent terrorist attack, Ukrainians will elect a new parliament Sunday to chart a way out of the crisis.

The beleaguered government of President Petro Poroshenko hopes the new parliament will bring the fresh faces and new energies needed to launch basic economic reforms and anti-corruption measures, and convince Ukraine's weary public that last winter's Maidan revolution is being fulfilled.

However the elections' specifics ultimately turn out, Ukraine looks set to vote in a slate of pro-European parties and leave the once dominant Party of Regions out in the cold. But it's unclear whether the new parliament which is likely to include many faces from the old can bring about the changes that Ukrainians say the country needs.

"I'd be very happy if anything would be done to stop this country from rushing down the road to ruin. Everywhere we look there are problems that just keep getting worse," says Natalia Maximenko, a teacher who joined a small protest on Kiev's main Kreshchatyk avenue Friday against collapsing living standards.

"But all these politicians are busy wrapping themselves in flags, making wild promises, but nobody seems to have any practical ideas. I don't know who I'm going to vote for," she says.

Half of the 450 deputies to the Supreme Rada, Ukraine's unicameral parliament, will be elected according to candidate lists posted by the 29 parties in the running. The other half will be chosen in first-past-the-post constituency races in most of the country, with the exception of rebel-held Donbass and Russian-annexed Crimea.

Ukraine has experienced a political earthquake in the past year. The country's biggest political force, the pro-Russian Party of Regions of former President Viktor Yanukovych has evaporated since he was overthrown last February. In its place, two new parties are trying to appeal to the Russian-speaking easterners who backed the ex-president. But it's not clear that either of them will win the 5 percent support needed to enter the Rada.

"If no pro-Russian parties make it in, it's possible that many in eastern Ukraine will feel deceived and left out of the process," says Vladimir Panchenko, director of the independent Center of Political Studies in Kiev. "After these elections, we will probably see new and better-organized parties appear in the east, perhaps based on the interests of the Russian minority."

But most experts argue that the "pro-Russian" versus "pro-European" divide that defined Ukrainian politics since the collapse of the USSR is already a thing of the past.

Whatever parliament forms in Kiev next week, they say, it's going to have a solid pro-Western majority. The parties leading in the final polls last week all appear to be various flavors of pro-European, with differences over how fast to depart Moscow's orbit and how sternly to prosecute the war against east Ukraine's Russian-backed rebels.

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Ukraine vote: Pro-West parties set for victory, but can they clean house?