Reshuffle and strikes: Ukraine's difficult days in early September 2024
A look back at how a cabinet shake-up and deadly Russian attacks overlapped in the first days of September 2024.
What did Ukraine's government look like on 5 September 2024, after two days of resignations and deadly strikes? The picture was of a cabinet losing a large part of its membership while the country absorbed heavy civilian losses.
A cabinet thinned out
On 3 September 2024, five Ukrainian ministers resigned, among them Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna. The departures left more than one-third of the cabinet vacant. The next day, 4 September, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba also resigned, as the government went through a reshuffle.
The scale of the turnover is the main point. Within two days, a government that was running a wartime state had lost its foreign minister, a deputy prime minister and several other ministers. Describing the moves as a reshuffle places them as a managed reconfiguration, but the vacancies were real and numerous.
Attacks on the same days
The political changes came alongside Russian strikes. On 3 September, missiles hit Poltava. Reported figures at the time were at least 55 dead and more than 328 injured. Later accounts put the toll at no fewer than 59 dead, with 16 missing. Those accounts say two missiles struck a branch of the Military Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies and a nearby hospital, making it the deadliest attack in Poltava Oblast of the war.
On 4 September, Russian drones and missiles hit buildings in Lviv, killing at least seven people and injuring 53.
What the overlap meant for governance
The two strands were separate: the resignations were a matter of cabinet composition, the strikes a matter of Russian military action. Yet they shared the same calendar. Ministers were leaving office while the state was dealing with mass casualties in Poltava and Lviv, which meant that continuity of public administration depended on how quickly the vacant posts were filled.
By 5 September 2024, the questions were therefore practical ones: who would fill the empty ministerial seats, and how the government would carry on its work, including in diplomacy after the foreign minister's departure, while civilian areas remained under fire.
