Zelensky replaces Prime Minister Svyrydenko in sweeping Ukraine government shake-up

KYIV — Volodymyr Zelensky is taking apart the government he assembled barely a year ago. In a statement posted to social media on Sunday, Ukraine’s president announced that Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko will step down as part of a wholesale renewal of the cabinet — and that the heads of the country’s law-enforcement agencies will be replaced along with it.

“Ukraine is changing its political strategy,” Zelensky wrote, presenting the shake-up not as a verdict on his ministers but as a reorganisation of the state around diplomacy.

“Each priority foreign policy direction will be overseen by a specific individual with substantial experience who is capable of delivering on the agreements reached at the leaders’ level and fulfilling the expectations of the Ukrainian people.”

The president said he had discussed the plan with Svyrydenko and that both had agreed it “requires a renewal of the Cabinet of Ministers”. He offered no timetable. Under Ukraine’s constitution, a prime minister’s resignation brings down the entire government, which stays on in a caretaker role until parliament confirms a successor; the ruling Servant of the People faction is expected to take up the nominations in the coming week.

A move to Washington

Zelensky was warm about the woman he is removing. “I am grateful to Yuliia for her clear, steady, and effective work as Prime Minister, for her years of productive service on Ukraine’s team,” he wrote, adding that he had offered her “the opportunity to lead a new and important area of relations with a key partner”. He did not name the partner. In Kyiv, few pretended not to know which one he meant: opposition lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak said Svyrydenko was likely to become Ukraine’s next ambassador to the United States. “That means she will leave the post of prime minister and the entire government will be reshuffled,” he said.

Svyrydenko confirmed her resignation within hours. “I am proud to have had the honour of leading the Government during one of the most difficult periods in Ukraine’s modern history,” she wrote, saying she remained ready to serve the state in whatever role it required.

Named prime minister in July 2025 at the age of 39, the former economy minister is best known abroad as the negotiator who closed the minerals and reconstruction agreement with Washington in the spring of 2025 — the deal that anchored American commercial interest in Ukraine’s postwar future. If she does move to the embassy in Washington, the relationship that matters most to Kyiv — weapons, money and any eventual settlement — would be handled by the official who knows its files best.

The successor question

Zelensky named no replacement. Lawmakers and Ukrainian media point to three men:

• Denys Shmyhal, the energy minister and Svyrydenko’s predecessor, who ran the government from 2020 to 2025 — longer than anyone since Ukraine’s independence;
• Mykhailo Fedorov, the defence minister who made his name digitising the Ukrainian state;
• Serhii Koretskyi, chief executive of the state energy company Naftogaz.

Parliament, which has confirmed every wartime nomination the president has sent it, is unlikely to resist. With elections suspended under martial law, the reshuffle — the second in less than a year, after the one that installed Svyrydenko last July — once again redistributes senior posts within a small circle of trusted officials rather than widening it. That is precisely what Zelensky’s critics dislike about his wartime governance, and what his allies argue keeps the state functional under fire.

Hours before the Paris summit

The priorities the president listed are concrete: delivering the agreements reached with allied leaders on manufacturing Patriot air-defence systems, advancing Ukraine’s accession to the European Union, and deepening new partnerships in the Gulf. The timing is more concrete still. On Monday, some 25 heads of state and government of the “coalition of the willing” — the grouping of Ukraine’s backers that has grown to 37 nations — meet in Paris alongside NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte and EU leaders Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa, to discuss Russia’s shadow fleet, new military capabilities for Ukraine and a broader mobilisation of Europe’s defence industry.

The shake-up also lands at a moment Western assessments describe as Ukraine’s strongest since the war’s first year: a front line that has barely moved in months and a Russian war economy under visible strain — a shift The New York Times summarised on Sunday as a leadership change “as the war turns in Ukraine’s favor”. The war itself has not paused for the politics: Russian attacks killed at least four people in the Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson regions over the weekend. Zelensky’s wager is that a government rebuilt around diplomacy can convert battlefield resilience into signed agreements — on weapons, on Europe, and eventually on peace.