Ukraine | Ministers are now resigning on the job – Researcher: “I wasn’t surprised”

Late on Tuesday evening, at least six Ukrainian government ministers submitted their resignations.

“Autumn is very important for Ukraine. The institutions of our state must be organized so that Ukraine achieves all the results we need – for all of us. For this, we need to strengthen some parts of the government – and personnel decisions have been prepared,” the President of Ukraine to Volodymyr Zelensky said in his Tuesday night review.

Among other things, the country’s two deputy prime ministers, the minister of justice and, most famously, the minister of foreign affairs Dmytro Kuleba have submitted their resignations. On Wednesday, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine’s parliament approved the resignation of four ministers, but Kuleba’s resignation has not yet been processed.

of The Financial Times by some of the ministers believe they will remain in the government, but in a new role.

Group leader of Zelenskyi’s Servant of the People party Davyd Arahamija also said that more than half of the staff of the Cabinet of Ministers will change. This and the previous week, the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force and the director of the energy company Ukrenerho were also dismissed.

Institute of Foreign Policy program director Arkady Moshes according to the changes indicate the concentration of power in Zelenskyi’s office.

“I wasn’t surprised, and I even expected the prime minister to resign. This is a long-term trend in which political power is concentrated in the office of the president. Basically, it’s inevitable for a country at war,” says Moshes.

Moshes points out that the composition of the Ukrainian government has hardly changed since the start of the war, that is, the actual government of national unity, which would also include the opposition, has not been formed.

In the short term, the goal of the changes is probably to bring new life to the administration and its activities, says Moshes.

Zelenskyi justified the changes on Tuesday by saying that in the future “certain areas of foreign and domestic policy will have a slightly different emphasis”.

However, the changes directly affect the development of democracy in Ukraine.

Moshes and senior researcher at the Institute of Foreign Policy Ryhor Nizhnikau already said in the report they published in November that the concentration of power is a long-term development.

In the report, Moshes and Nizhnikau estimate that if Zelensky’s administration wants to bring about rapid changes, it may well resort to old-fashioned, informal means to achieve them. That, in turn, means reducing the power of the parliament and ministers elected by the people in elections.

“Parliament should play a significant role, and in war the role of the president increases. Zelenskyi can try to explain things this way, but the main reason is that the Cabinet of Ministers is losing its power and its constitutional position in favor of the presidential administration,” says Moshes.

That same evening when the ministers began to announce their intentions to resign, Russia delivered a devastating blow to the Institute of Military Communications in Pultava.

Last week Ukraine lost of the all-important F-16 fighter and its pilot for an as yet unknown reason. Russia in eastern Ukraine auger on its way to Pokrovsky, the loss of which could lead to the loss of the entire Donbas region.

According to Moshes, however, the difficulties on the front lines are not directly related to the ministers’ resignations.

“The decision on board personnel changes has certainly been planned for some time. The resigning ministers are also not directly responsible for the situation at the front.”