Foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, one of Ukraine’s most recognisable faces on the international stage, submitted his resignation on Wednesday ahead of an expected major government reshuffle.
On the battlefield, Russian strikes killed seven people in a western Ukraine city, a day after one of the deadliest missile attacks since the war began.
Kuleba, 43, didn’t give a reason for stepping down. Four other cabinet ministers tendered their resignations late on Tuesday, making the cabinet reshuffle likely the biggest since Russia’s February 2022 invasion.
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian parliament accepted the resignations of a deputy Prime Minister, the strategic industries minister and two other ministers, the lawmakers said.
The session was over for the day and the resignation of the foreign minister had not been considered, the lawmakers added on the Telegram app. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated last week that a reshuffle was imminent, with the war poised to enter a critical stage and as its 1,000-day mark looms in November.
Zelensky needs to keep up Ukraine’s morale amid the grinding war of attrition with its bigger neighbour and steel the country’s resolve for what will be another hard winter. Russia has been smashing Ukraine’s power grid, knocking out some 70 per cent of generation capacity and rupturing heat and water supplies. And Wednesday’s deadly attack on Lviv — a city near the border with Nato member Poland and far from the front lines — underscored how all of Ukraine is at the mercy of Moscow’s long-range capabilities.
The Ukrainian army’s risky incursion almost a month ago into Russia’s Kursk border region raised Ukrainian sprits and countered months of grim news from the front line in eastern Ukraine. The incursion’s ultimate goals are unclear, though Zelensky says Ukraine wants to create a buffer zone there that would prevent cross-border Russian attacks.
President Vladimir Putin remains bent on pushing his army deeper into eastern Ukraine. Russia’s onslaught in Donetsk, where Ukraine is short of troops and air defences, and long-range missile strikes that repeatedly hit civilian areas of Ukraine signal that Putin will remain uncompromising and unrelenting in his efforts to crush resistance.
AP/PTI
