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Ukraine’s parliament returns to work on Tuesday after its summer break, reconvening with two of the government’s most sensitive wartime portfolios still without heads.
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When the Verkhovna Rada voted in Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi’s new cabinet on 16 July, it approved every post except two: defence minister and foreign affairs minister.
For a month now, the defence ministry has been without permanent head, amid Russia’s intensifying ballistic missile attacks, an unusual situation for a country defending itself from the full-scale invasion for over four years.
Under Ukraine’s constitution only the president can submit nominees for the two posts, since both fall within his direct authority as supreme commander-in-chief and head of the country’s foreign policy.
Zelenskyy has so far yet to do so for either ministry.
Andrii Sybiha, who had already been permanent head of foreign ministry before the cabinet reshuffle, was kept on as acting foreign minister under a similar Cabinet order.
In the meantime, the defence ministry has been run by Yevhenii Khmara, the former acting head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), whom Zelenskyy tasked with the job on 16 July.
The ousted defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov suggested Khmara is not starting from scratch: in an interview on 6 August, he said he had personally handed his successor a detailed “war plan” and walked him through it.
“This was the first thing I did, I showed it to him personally,” Fedorov said, adding that he had “explained the logic – how that logic of the war plan then deconstructs into procurement, into development,” breaking an overall strategy into hundreds of individual projects, from weapons production to financing.
Street protests continued
Street protests over Fedorov’s removal have continued regardless.
On 16 August Dmytro Koziatynskyi, a war veteran and one of the protest organisers said the aim was “to remind the president of the importance of dialogue between the authorities and society, as well as of the fact that the president himself must bear responsibility for the consequences of all questionable personnel decisions.”
A petition read out at the latest demonstration and later handed to a representative of the Presidential Office pointed to one concession already won – Zelenskyy’s decision to replace Oleksandr Syrskyi with Mykhailo Drapatyi as commander-in-chief – while pressing him to explain other contested picks, including Rustem Umerov’s move to head the Foreign Intelligence Service.
Notably, the petition focused less on the minister and more on preserving the reform agenda Fedorov had championed, including anti-corruption measures in military procurement, a more accountable chain of command and Ukraine’s push into drone and data-driven warfare.
Zelenskyy has said he offered Fedorov “a prominent position in the government” centred on the tech sector, but Fedorov rejected every alternative, saying he will only return as defence minister.
