Ukraine is likely to get a new Prime Minister today and a much more pragmatic government as a result of the surprise reshuffle that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy triggered by asking the current Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko to step down at the weekend.

Under the Ukrainian constitution that means the entire cabinet has to quit and whoever comes in as the new PM is supposed to choose their own ministers. In practice it doesn't work like that. Zelenskiy remains fully in charge and will handpick who gets what job.

As I dig into this story there's a lot to unpack but several positive themes are emerging. The first is that the new government is likely to be very similar to the last one and this has been one of the best governments since Ukraine's independence. It's full of professionals and people who are focused on getting the job done and finally moving the country forward.

Before I begin there are two key points to mention at the start. First is the top candidate to take over as PM is Naftogaz’s CEO Serhii Koretskyi, who is a businessman, not a politician. Second, this reshuffle doesn’t seem to have been planned and was triggered by Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington Olga Stefanishyna announcing to Zelenskiy that she was going to quit “for personal” reasons.

The second, first. The local Ukrainian press is reporting that actually what happened is the Stefanishyna is under investigation for buying a luxury apartment in Kyiv for “well below market prices.” Bankova was about to be hit by yet another corruption scandal and Stefanishyna decided to fall on her sword before the brouhaha got going.

Zelenskiy reportedly saw this as an opportunity rather than a problem. Following the surprisingly warm meetings between Zelenskiy and US President Donald Trump in Ankara last week, Svyrydenko is the obvious person to send to capitalise on the renewed bonhomie as she is well known in Washington where she cut the infamous minerals deal in 2023.

A reshuffle also allows Zelenskiy to shake his corruption tainted Etch-a-sketch and reset his public image by putting some distance between himself and his former inner circle, pretty much all of whom have been tarred by the Energoatom corruption scandal, aka Mindichgate. Given the summer political season is over, after the Nato summit and the passage of the €90bn EU loan, this is a good time to remake the government at the start of the long summer holidays before the hard work of the autumn season starts. In eastern Europe no one does much during the three-month-long school break – a function of living in countries where you can’t go outside much during the six-month-long freezing cold winters. It’s a Siberian airmass thing.

Returning to Koretskyi, he is a very interesting choice, and it suggests a lot about Zelenskiy plans and expectations for the rest of the year. Koretskyi is an oil and gas man. He worked as an oil trader in the private sector before being appointed the head of Ukrnafta after it was nationalized out of the clutches of uber-oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who is now languishing in jail on well-deserved fraud charges. IntelliNews got his bank nationalized in 2016 with a cover story “Privat Investigations” that exposed a massive fraud where Kolomoisky stole about 99% of the bank’s deposits. He doesn’t like us.

Koretskyi turned the company around and transformed from a sinkhole of embezzlement to one of the most profitable companies in the country. Koretskyi was then transferred to run Naftogaz, the state gas company, which is more like a ministry of gas, in the same way Gazprom plays the same role in Russia. In many ways, Naftogaz is the Ukrainian energy sector.

Lastly, Koretskyi is noted for his total lack of political ambition. He met with Zelenskiy at the weekend and was reportedly “surprised” by the offer to become Prime Minister, but has accepted, according to Ukrainska Pravda. We are just waiting for the official proposal announcement today which the Rada has to approved that could come later this week.

To hire a professional rather than a loyalist to run a company as important as Naftogaz? This is very unusual for the Former Soviet Union (FSU). We have been arguing for several years now that Zelenskiy was a political novice when he took over as president, but he has been learning on the job. In the last three big reshuffles, he sacked extremely competent technocrats who were doing liberal reforms and put placemen in instead as he learnt the ropes and reverted to the proverbial Mendel's pea: corruption is not a problem of the system; corruption is the system. Without functioning institutions, you rely on personal loyalty and the only way to get that is give people jobs they can milk and your power becomes the ability to take that job away. The Energoatom scandal shows Zelenskiy was more or less running that system.

I think it’s a safe bet to say that Koretskyi is not cut from that cloth – at least he doesn’t have a reputation for that. So, what is going on? Reading into it and I believe that there have been several big changes recently that have led to this.

Big Change 1: Trump’s flip flop The Trump-Zelenskiy meeting in Ankara was a surprise. Trump has been wanting to do the so-called Dmitriev package $12 trillion of business deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin but that has gone nowhere – largely because Zelenskiy refuses to surrender.

Following the sobering experiences of being defeated by Tehran in the Iran war, Trump has recalibrated and just wants out of all these wars before the November mid-terms. The upshot, and in an attempt to rescue some of his “peacemaker” creds, he has done an about face on Ukraine. Rather than holding it at arm’s length and pressuring Zelenskiy on Putin’s behalf, he suddenly offered a Patriot license and also a real security deal.

The latter is really important as that gives Zelenskiy the opportunity to do a deal with Putin. The logic is that he can’t give up the Donbas to Putin without a guarantee as there is nothing to stop Putin marching on Kyiv in a year’s time. With it, if Zelenskiy does give up the Donbas – and he will have to in any deal format with Putin – then Russia can’t use that military advantage (there is nothing to defend between Donbas and Kyiv) as that would start a war with the US. It’s the best of many bad options facing Zelenskiy.

Big Change 2: ceasefire deals is dead A lot of work was done last year culminating in the 27-point peace plan (27PPP) agreed with Putin at the Moscow meeting on December 3. That plan has been on the table and the White House preferred option until the Iran war started. However, despite the considerable progress, it appears to have completely disappeared now.

After the start of Operation Epic Fury, the EU stepped in and tried to take over the talks, but that has totally failed too. Brussels attempts to find a suitable interlocutor to lead the negotiations (talks the Kremlin has never agreed to hold) ended in a risible failure. Despite the pomp of the Bastille Day summit in Paris yesterday, the EU (or better E3) has been demoted to the role of supporting actor, providing money and homes for factories to make a few weapons and some ammo. Importantly, Zelenskiy says Ukraine already makes 60% of what it needs itself.

With no prospect of any ceasefire at all, both Kyiv and Moscow have reverted to their default positions: the war continues for at least two more years.

Big change 3: Zelenskiy takes charge The big change in the war is the maturation of Ukraine’s military tech. It has been an innovator in drone technology since the start, but the introduction of medium- and long-range drones is changing the game. Drones are still not powerful enough to flatten a Russian refinery, unlike a Russian missile flattening a Ukrainian power station, but not only can they fly all the way to the Omsk refinery 1,500km away, they appear to have become a lot more accurate.

Previously, drones would hit a refinery but only do nominal damage. Now they are targeting, and hitting, specific things in the refineries – the complicated and delicate parts that Russia can’t replace on its own. This accuracy makes up for the lack of power. Repairs used to be carried out in a few days. After the Moscow refinery was hit this month, it is out of action for the rest of the year.

Zelenskiy is now in a position to take the war to Russia in a meaningful way. Up until now, regular Russians barely felt any impact from the war. That is not true now. They are standing in hours-long queues to get gas and the economy is slowing down noticeably, hitting the SMES especially hard where a lot of the population work.

Zelenskiy new more aggressive attitude was also visible in his recent threats to attack Belarus if it didn’t turn the communications repeater stations off that Russia was using to guide its drones in northern Ukraine. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko backed down and turned them off, much to Putin’s annoyance.

Big Change 4: Ukraine is on its own Taken all together, I get the very strong impression that Zelenskiy increasingly sees himself as on his own in his fight with the Kremlin. The West has constantly failed him, promising to “stand with Ukraine as long as it takes” and then sending “some, but not enough” help so that he can’t make any real progress.

Now that he has the home-grown weapons (and the EU’s €90bn) he doesn’t need to listen to Brussels or Washington anymore. The Biden administration sent Ukraine HIMARS but then banned the AFU from using against targets inside Russia,which is bonkers. Today, dozens of Ukrainian-made drones are hitting targets all over European Russia and beyond on a daily basis. As IntelliNews reported our feature on the missile war, Zelenskiy has adopted a punishment strategy that is increasingly effective.

That doesn’t mean Ukraine is going to win, or even that this strategy will force Putin to talk to make meaningful concessions. The basic problem Zelenskiy still faces, which he openly admitted in Ankara, is that “Russia’s ballistic missiles are its last advantage.” Russia still has an overwhelming advantage in the drones vs missiles arms race.

Which brings us back to the reshuffle: given there is no hope of a ceasefire; given there is no hope of new Patriots; given there is no hope of any game changing material help from the US or EU; and give that it is almost certain Russia will restart its bombardment of Ukraine’s power infrastructure in a few months’ time, Zelenskiy is getting ready now.

This shake up was not about consolidating his grasp on power but putting in the best people to cope with the coming crisis. For the first time, Ukraine has become a meritocracy where the best qualified get the job.

A good example is the Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who, by all accounts, is universally hated by everyone in the Defence procurement bureaucracy. But that is because he is highly efficient, has closed kickback schemes, introduced IT transparency, is getting the equipment to the frontline and is basically doing his job. Apparently, Zelenskiy offered him the PM job (and he remains a possibility), but he said no as he hasn’t finished cleaning up the defence ministry. Compare him to Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who got sacked after a scheme was uncovered that inflated the price of government purchased eggs four-fold to fill someone’s pocket, amongst many similar scams. Like Koretskyi, Fedorov seems to be a clean pair of hands, replacing a predecessor that was not.

The same is true for the new Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal, formerly the longest serving prime minister in Ukraine’s independent history, who replaced Herman Halushchenko, who was fingered as one of the recipients of the $100mn kickback scheme – he stole the money that should have made the nuclear power sector’s substation invulnerable to missile attacks which didn’t happen, a crime for which he will burn in hell. Apparently, Zelenskiy also offered Shmyhal his old job back as well, but he is also busy fixing the damage Russia has done to the system.

Here too we see a clean pair of competent hands replacing a pair that was actually arrested on corruption charges (but later released after posting a $3.3mn bail). And again, energy is a central theme that runs through the entire reshuffle story.

Zelenskiy said in Ankara that Ukraine has won on the sea, after it drove the Russian Black Sea fleet out of the Crimea and sank its flagship with a Neptune missile. The AFU has brough the Russian land advances to a standstill with its swarms of drones. The kill zone along the line of contact is already 30km wide and getting wider every month. Russia has taken the key Donbas town of Kostiantynivka, but cost in lives has doubled from the 150,000 men lost in Bakhmut to an estimated 300,000 in this latest “victory.” Now the war “moves into the air,” Zelenskiy said last week. He appears fully aware of what is coming and is getting ready for it. He has been likened to Churchill since the start of the war many times, but if this reading is right, then this is his Churchillian moment.

Zelenskiy is on his own. No one is coming to rescue him with $300bn of Russian cash, German-made Leopard Main Battle Tanks or a fleet of F-16 fighters. That is clear to him now after four years of humiliating begging. And now Ukraine has run out of Patriot interceptors and the skies are completely open, he is facing a punishing winter that could be far worse than anything that has gone before. This is the moment when Ukrainian resilience will define itself as heroes yet again as they have already shown themselves to be many times over. This is Ukraine’s Battle of Britain moment and Zelenskiy is getting ready to fight as hard as he can.

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