KYIV -- With Russia’s full-scale invasion at 30 months and counting, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is trying to shake things up – on the battlefield and in the halls of power in Kyiv.
In early August, Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into Russian territory, sending troops across the border and opening a new front in the Kursk region.
This week, Zelenskiy launched the biggest government shake-up since the all-out war began, replacing Kyiv's foreign minister -- a prominent face of Ukraine abroad since 2020 -- and engineering several other changes in the cabinet of ministers and his influential administration, widely known as the presidential office.
Here’s a look at the motives, the timing, and the potential effects of a move that the wartime leader says will give Ukraine “new energy” at a crucial juncture but that critics say will actually change little.
Why Now?
Zelenskiy replaced his defense minister a year ago and the commander in chief of the armed forces in February, and there had long been rumblings of a more sweeping change in government.
Ruslan Stefanchuk, speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, announced in June that there would be changes in the cabinet, noting that several ministries, including those in charge of culture, agricultural policy, and infrastructure, had been without confirmed ministers for some time.
Nothing happened at that time, though, and subsequent rumors that Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal might be on the way out proved inaccurate. He is still in place.
Prominent political scientist Volodymyr Fesenko told RFE/RL that he believes Zelenskiy and his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, had long wanted to make changes but only recently “had time” to get to the nitty-gritty and make decisions about who should go where.
“As soon as they took the corresponding political decisions…that’s when it happened,” Fesenko said.
In any case, the shake-up comes at an intense time in the war, with Ukraine holding territory in Russia’s Kursk region and Moscow’s forces pressing forward in the Donbas -- the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, which Russian President Vladimir Putin appears determined to seize in their entirety.
It also comes ahead of a tough winter, as Ukraine struggles to keep the power on while Russian forces pummel the country’s energy infrastructure in addition to the homes of civilians. Furthermore, it comes as Zelenskiy, who is beseeching the West to let Ukraine strike military targets deeper in Russia with long-range weapons -- prepares to potentially hand U.S. President Joe Biden a “victory plan” later this month.
What's The Goal?
On September 4, Zelenskiy said that Ukraine needs “new energy” and described the government shake-up that was unfolding as aimed at “strengthening our state in various areas." The president, who was elected in April 2019, said that some officials have been in their posts for 4 1/2 to five years.
He called for quick results in an address the following evening, urging his new team to work "more actively than before" and achieve advancements in arms industry investments, financial stability, "support for the front line," and Ukraine's EU membership bid.
Some opponents suspect the reshuffle is aimed at further consolidating power in the hands of Zelenskiy and his administration, pointing to the fact that several of the moves involve cabinet members shifting to the presidential office or vice-versa.
Andriy Sybiha, the former first deputy foreign minister who is replacing Dmytro Kuleba as the top Ukrainian diplomat, earlier worked in the presidential office. The new minister of development of communities, territories, and infrastructure, Oleksiy Kuleba, is a former deputy of Yermak. And Iryna Vereshchuk, the former minister for reintegration of temporarily occupied territories, is moving to the presidential office to work on social policy.
Oleh Rybachuk, a deputy prime minister under former President Viktor Yushchenko and now head of the Kyiv-based NGO Center UA, said that “it’s impossible to talk about new faces [in the cabinet] because they are chosen based on many criteria and by various influence groups. They have to go through this ‘casting’ process by influential figures in [Zelenskiy’s] office -- mainly Yermak.”
Yermak has not commented on his role in the shake-up. Earlier, in an interview with a Ukrainian media outlet, he responded to claims that he interferes in the work of the Foreign Ministry by saying, "My authority ends where the mandate of the president ends," adding that he sees himself as a national-security adviser.
Fesenko had a different take than Rybachuk on the back-and-forth movement between the cabinet and the presidential office. The “personnel reserve…is limited,” he said, so the new appointments were made by “choosing from among those who have proven themselves on Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s team.”
“They want to keep people on the president’s team so that they don’t just go nowhere, so Vereshchuk will work for a while in the presidential office, and then maybe some other positions will emerge,” Fesenko said.
Will The Shake-Up Succeed?
Opposition figures voiced doubt that the government shake-up will bring positive change.
“No fresh blood will emerge, let’s put it bluntly,” Yulia Klymenko, a lawmaker from the opposition party Holos, said on an RFE/RL Ukrainian Service program on September 5. “It’s the same people. They are just changing places, moving from one ministry to another. We don’t see or hear any new ideas or fresh or new people.”
Laying out what he suggested was a barrier to effective change, Rybachuk asserted that ministers have little power, while “the real decisions” are made by people close to Zelenskiy in his office, who he said “do not bear the necessary level of responsibility for their decisions.”
“The president says he wants to see people with new energy, active professionals, but at the same time his entourage says that he is setting the condition that these new people must understand faster…and immediately fulfill all the whims, essentially, of the president and his office,” Rybachuk said on the same program. “That is certainly not a model that will bring us significant results.”
Supporters of Zelenskiy argue that he is open to bringing new people into government, pointing among other things to his appointment of Rustam Umerov, of the Holos party, as defense minister last year.
Fesenko said he believes that by “new energy” Zelenskiy meant changes within existing teams and not exclusively “new faces.”
"At one time, the president ‘fell ill’ with this ‘disease of the new face’ when he thought that if he appointed enough new, young people, there would be an update” or change, he said. “And it turned out that, unfortunately, it does not work.”
Ukrainians are likely to judge the shake-up by how things go in the coming weeks and months.
A woman in Sumy, a northeastern border region that comes under frequent attack from Russia, suggested that she welcomed a shake-up “because there is no satisfaction…with the people who have been sitting in posts for too long.”
“There are no changes,” she told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service.
A man in the northern city of Chernihiv, which avoided Russian capture early in the full-scale invasion and also comes under attack as the war drags on, said he believes the shake-up “is about all those ministers who have compiled certain negative [images]. As a response, the government is trying to get rid of those negatives along with the people."
But he suggested he would not hold his breath, saying that what’s important is “not the people but the system we have.”
A woman in the same city said her biggest hope is “for the war to end soon.”
“My two sons are fighting, and my grandson is in the military,” she said, repeating that she hopes “the war will end as soon as possible.”
