Kuleba resignation deepens Ukraine's cabinet reshuffle
A look back at the day Ukraine's foreign minister left office, one day after five ministers had stepped down.
What did it mean when Ukraine's foreign minister left government in the middle of a cabinet overhaul? On 4 September 2024, Dmytro Kuleba resigned as foreign affairs minister amid a reshuffle of the cabinet.
His departure followed a wave of resignations the previous day. On 3 September 2024, five Ukrainian ministers resigned from their positions, among them Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna. As reported at the time, the departures left more than one-third of the cabinet vacant.
Kuleba's resignation therefore added the head of the country's diplomacy to a list of vacancies that was already large. The reports from those days describe the changes as part of a cabinet reshuffle.
Diplomacy in the background
Foreign relations were also in the news in the days before. On 2 September 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Mongolia to discuss a China–Russia gas pipeline, intended to recoup Russian losses from Western sanctions. Ukraine and the European Union had urged Mongolia to arrest him under his International Criminal Court warrant.
Taken together, the first days of September 2024 combined a wide-ranging government reshuffle in Kyiv with continuing diplomatic activity around Ukraine's foreign relations.
