Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba resigned on Wednesday, signaling a major reshuffling of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration.
Ruslan Stefanchuk, the speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, posted Kuleba’s resignation on his Facebook page, along with resignations of at least five other officials. Stefanchuk said the resignations would be considered at an upcoming plenary session of the parliament.
The resignations come as Kyiv is pushing for the U.S. to withdraw a ban on using long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory. It also follows a bold incursion by Ukraine into Russian territory last month. Ukraine now holds nearly 450 square miles of territory in Russia.
Moscow since then has increased the pace of its missile attacks across Ukraine, with Tuesday strikes against a military academy and other targets in Poltava killing 51 people and injuring hundreds. Russia has unleashed hundreds of missiles across Ukraine in the past few days, hitting the far-western city of Lviv and energy and water infrastructure.
Zelensky did not immediately comment on the resignations, but he described strengthening areas of the government in his Tuesday nightly address, saying “personnel decisions have been prepared” and “there will be changes in the office.”
“Autumn 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,” Zelensky said.
Kuleba was a key Ukrainian official on the international stage pushing for Western allies supporting Ukraine to increase their pledges of assistance.
Speaking to CNN on Tuesday, Kuleba called for partner countries to send air defense systems to combat Russia’s ballistic missiles.
Others who resigned included Ukraine’s Minister for Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin, the former CEO of its railways and a key interlocutor with the U.S. in helping to revitalize Ukraine’s economy and build up its potential as a hub of military systems production.
Dalibor Roháč, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the political reshuffle is a feature of Zelensky’s leadership style to circulate people out and back into positions of authority.
“It has been a recurrent, if cautiously articulated, complaint, from the opposition that they are oftentimes left out and have little voice in shaping of policies that are then expected to command broad support,” he said.
Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament in the opposition European Solidarity party, said he is pushing for a national unity government. He criticized Zelensky’s ruling party as failing to deliver a strategic vision for the country and that the rash of changes only served to give the appearance of a change of direction.
“I think that the reasons why this or that minister left are different. Some of them want to leave themselves, they are just exhausted, some of them the president or prime minister they want to change them, but all of these things combine in such a one moment to show the big change in the government — it’s more internal politics to show to Ukrainian people that we will have a kind of new blood,” he told The Hill.
“But the problem of the government is not some concrete people, the problem of the Ukrainian government is, first of all it’s super centralized. Yes it’s the time of war, martial law. But it’s too much. I want to see the government much more autonomous. The second problem is that the government doesn’t have a strategic vision and concept and program, they just run the country like day to day, that’s all. We need a strategy. … The best option is to create the national unity government to unite all forces, to tackle the challenges that we face.”