Ukraine’s parliament returns with defence and foreign ministry crises unresolved

Ukraine’s Rada Back in Session as Wartime Leadership Vacuum Persists

Poinews.com – The Verkhovna Rada resumes its legislative schedule on Tuesday following the summer recess, yet two of the most consequential wartime portfolios remain vacant at the permanent level. When lawmakers endorsed Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi’s reshuffled cabinet on 16 July, they cleared every single appointment save two: the defence ministry and the foreign affairs ministry. For an entire month, Ukraine’s defence department has operated without a confirmed minister — a striking anomaly for a nation that has been repelling a full-scale Russian invasion for more than four years while absorbing escalating ballistic missile strikes.

Constitutional Bottleneck

Under the Ukrainian constitution, the president alone holds the power to nominate candidates for those two specific posts, given that both sit within his direct remit as supreme commander-in-chief and as architect of national foreign policy. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has, to date, submitted no nominee for either ministry. Andrii Sybiha, who already occupied the foreign ministry’s top post before the reshuffle, was retained in an acting capacity through a comparable cabinet directive. On the defence side, Zelenskyy assigned the interim role on 16 July to Yevhenii Khmara, previously the acting head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU).

Protests Demand Accountability

Public demonstrations against the ouster of former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov have continued unabated. Speaking on 16 August, Dmytro Koziatynskyi — a war veteran and among the organisers of the marches — framed the campaign’s purpose:

“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 aloud at the most recent rally and subsequently delivered to a representative of the Presidential Office acknowledged one concession already secured — Zelenskyy’s replacement of Oleksandr Syrskyi with Mykhailo Drapatyi as commander-in-chief — while pressing the president to justify other disputed appointments, notably Rustem Umerov’s elevation to head the Foreign Intelligence Service. Strikingly, the document dwelt less on the ministerial vacancy itself and more on safeguarding the reform programme Fedorov had championed: anti-corruption safeguards within military procurement, a more transparent chain of command, and Ukraine’s accelerating pivot toward drone- and data-driven warfare.

The “War Plan” Handoff

In a 6 August interview, Fedorov indicated that Khmara was not inheriting a blank slate. The former minister claimed he had personally delivered his successor a comprehensive “war plan” and walked him through its architecture.

“This was the first thing I did, I showed it to him personally,” Fedorov stated, explaining that he had “explained the logic – how that logic of the war plan then deconstructs into procurement, into development,” fragmenting an overarching strategy into hundreds of discrete projects spanning weapons production through financing.

A Standoff Over Return

Zelenskyy has publicly stated that he extended Fedorov “a prominent position in the government” oriented around the technology sector. Fedorov turned down every alternative put before him, declaring he will re-enter government solely as defence minister.