Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who served in the role since 2020, resigned on Wednesday as part of the biggest Ukrainian government shake-up of the war.
Kuleba’s move came a day after several other ministers also resigned. In total, six ministers have stepped down, and they will be replaced as part of a reshuffling that President Volodymyr Zelensky said would bring new “energy” to the government.
“We need new energy today, and these steps are related only to the strengthening of our state in different directions,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky’s term as president expired back in May, but he’s stayed in power because there have been no elections since the Russian invasion. Parliamentary and presidential elections have both been delayed due to laws that prohibit holding a vote under martial law.
At one point, Zelensky considered holding elections if the West would fund them, but he later ruled out the idea and has been under no pressure from the US or other Western backers on the issue.
The Washington Post noted that Zelensky is carrying out the reshuffle ahead of a trip to the US, where he’s expected to present a “victory plan” to US officials. Ukrainian officials have been pushing hard for the US to allow the use of US missiles in long-range strikes inside Russia.
Throughout the war, Kuleba was one of the leading Ukrainian officials pushing for more military aid and was not afraid to criticize Kyiv’s Western backers. He recently said that Ukraine’s biggest problem was the Western concern for escalation.
“Ever since the beginning of the large-scale invasion, the biggest problem Ukraine has been facing is the domination of the concept of escalation in the decision-making processes among our partners,” Kuleba said last week.
The obvious expression here is "rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic."
Alex Mercouris on YouTube thinks this might have been to camouflage the most important firing, the firing of the foreign minister Kuleba, who has been a disaster:
-Failed to get Third World support for Ukraine.
-Failed to push for diplomacy with Russia.
-Went to China to ask them to arrange negotiations with Russia, while back home they were secretly preparing the Kursk incursion at the same time; when China found out they were furious.
-Arranged the "peace conference" in Austria where few showed up and few signed the muddled final statement, so they had to count EU signatures three times for different EU institutions, and added the Patriarch of Constantinople who does not represent a country; he was force to withdraw his signature after Turkey's government complained.
However, those are a lot of resignations, and several important ones. Simplicius the Thinker on his Substack instead thinks it is "the rats leaving the ship." That they made this decision themselves.
Or, he says, that they were pushed by Zelensky because he wants to be seen as doing something. Give the media something energetic to write about.
That last one seems the most likely. It's what he usually does, after all; fail on the battlefield and the Ukrainians shell the civilians in Donetsk (but now they're pushed out of Avdiivka so they can't do that) and in Belgorod (causing Russia to push them away from the border near Kharkov), or NATO officers help them aim a large amount of missiles to sink a Russian patrol boat, or they send drones into Russia, or they murder a Russian war blogger or a speaker.
The whole Kursk incursion was a diversion. Now they need a diversion from the diversion.
Dmytro Kuleba or Mr. Potato Head with his squidgy nose can run for the hills of Switzerland now.
More like Fired…!
"…ahead of a trip to the US, where (Zelenskiyy)'s expected to present a “victory plan” to US officials."
He arrives. "I request political asylum…!!"
…
Oh, did they mean a victory plan for Ukraine over the Russian Federation ? No, there isn't one of those.