Ukraine’s foreign minister resigns in major government ‘reboot’

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba led a spate of high-level resignations 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 flurry 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.

A resignation letter purporting to be from Kuleba was posted on Facebook by the parliament speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk Wednesday morning.

In addition to Kuleba, who has served as foreign minister since before the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, several other high-profile ministers and officials tendered their resignations, including Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk.

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.

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 its 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 near 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.

In one of the deadliest attacks on Ukraine since the war began, 53 people were killed and more than 270 injured Tuesday in ballistic missile strikes on a military facility in the central city of Poltava.