Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba led a spate of high-level resignations in Ukraine on Wednesday, as Kyiv looked to match its reinvigorated battlefield efforts with renewed leadership.
The biggest reshuffle of the country’s government since the Kremlin's full-scale invasion comes as Ukraine presses on with its offensive inside Russia but reels from a barrage of deadly missile strikes.
David Arakhamia, who leads President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “Servant of the People” party in the Ukrainian Parliament, said in a post on Telegram there would be a “major government reboot,” in which more than half of the Cabinet would change.
“Tomorrow is the day of layoffs, and the day after tomorrow is the day of appointments,” Arakhamia said Tuesday night.
Zelenskyy hinted at the upcoming changes in his nightly address Tuesday, saying this fall will be “extremely important” for Ukraine.
“And our state institutions must be set up in such a way that Ukraine will achieve all the results we need — for all of us,” he said. That will require changes in Parliament and in his office as well, he said.
A resignation letter purporting to be from Kuleba was posted on Facebook by Parliament Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk on Wednesday morning.
In addition to Kuleba, who has served as the face of Ukrainian diplomacy since before the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, several other high-profile ministers and officials tendered their resignations. They include Iryna Vereshchuk, a prominent deputy prime minister and minister for reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories, who confirmed her resignation on Telegram.
Stefanchuk also shared resignation letters apparently submitted by Olha Stefanishyna, deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine; Strategic Industries Minister Oleksandr Kamyshin; Justice Minister Denys Maliuska; and Environment Minister Ruslan Strilets.
It’s unclear if they are going into other senior posts after the reshuffle.
In his first one-on-one interview since Ukraine's incursion into Russia last month, Zelenskyy told NBC News on Tuesday that Kyiv was planning to hold Russian territories it has seized for as long as needed, as they are integral to his “victory plan” to end the war, adding that he will soon present that plan to international partners including the United States.
But he said Ukraine did not need the Russian land in the long term. “We don’t want to bring our Ukrainian way of life there,” he said.
It comes as Ukraine continues its incursion into the Russian border region of Kursk, nearly a month after it launched a surprise attack that has posed a new challenge for the Kremlin. Despite its success so far, Ukraine is suffering losses in the east, where Russians troops have been advancing faster than they have in some time, President Vladimir Putin said earlier this week.
And Ukraine continues to be attacked almost daily, with Russia seemingly ramping up its strikes on the country's energy infrastructure, the same strategy it has employed for the last two winters as the cold weather set in.
Seven people, including three children, died in an attack on the western city of Lviv early Wednesday, the city’s mayor said.
It came a day after one of the deadliest attacks on Ukraine since the war began.
As many as 53 people were killed and more than 270 injured Tuesday in ballistic missile strikes on a military facility in the central city of Poltava, officials said. NBC News was able to geolocate a video showing bomb damage to the 179th Training Center of Signal Forces for the Ukrainian armed forces in Poltava.
Ukrainians were tight-lipped about the military nature of the target, but the Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday that it hit the center because it was training “communications and electronic warfare specialists,” as well as drone pilots.
Ukraine has been waging its own campaign of drone strikes deep inside Russia, setting airfields and oil depots ablaze.
