On the evening of 12 July, Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko left the President's Office at a brisk pace, visibly shaken.
It wasn't the first time she had walked out of the President's Office in tears. In late 2020, at the very beginning of her rise within Volodymyr Zelenskyy's team, Andrii Yermak, then head of the President's Office, decided to appoint Svyrydenko as his deputy for economic affairs. At the time she was little more than the "seventh deputy minister" under then-economy minister Tymofii Mylovanov. An interview with Oleh Tatarov and whatever was in his notorious "folder" [a dossier containing compromising material – ed.] proved to be a deeply distressing experience for her. [Oleh Tatarov is the deputy head of the President's Office who oversees law enforcement coordination and has long been regarded as one of Ukraine's most influential officials. A former Interior Ministry official under President Viktor Yanukovych, he remains a controversial figure because of past corruption allegations (which he denies) and his perceived influence over Ukraine's law enforcement agencies. Svyrydenko was deeply upset during her 2020 interview with Tatarov, reportedly because of the contents of the dossier that was presented to her before she was appointed as a deputy head of the President's Office – ed.]
Nearly six years have passed since then. Svyrydenko climbed to the very top of Ukraine's government hierarchy, yet even that wasn't enough to protect her. Her years of devoted service to Zelenskyy, finding ways to implement even his most populist ideas, did not earn the prime minister even the courtesy of a proper explanation for her dismissal.
"The president simply presented Yuliia with a fait accompli: you're leaving. She was deeply hurt," recollects one senior member of the governing team, describing the final meeting between the president and the former PM. "There were no obvious reasons to remove her from the Cabinet. She'd spent a year working tirelessly, finding the money for the one-off payments programmes, doing everything that was asked of her, only for the president to tell her: 'Time to go.'"
And so Yuliia Svyrydenko's nearly year-long tenure came to an end. It has to be said, it was the sort of year you wouldn't wish on your worst political enemy. Her very first week saw the shocking scandal surrounding the attack on the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the "cardboard Maidan" protests. That was followed by an autumn overshadowed by the Mindich tapes scandal (Operation Midas) and Russia's overwhelming advantage on the battlefield. Then came Ukraine's most difficult winter on record as relentless Russian attacks crippled the country's energy infrastructure.
By a twist of fate, when Svyrydenko passed the baton to Serhii Koretskyi, it was once again against the backdrop of demonstrators chanting slogans and holding cardboard signs.
The new Cabinet has entered its first weeks in office amid a major political scandal, mass protests, and growing tensions with Ukraine's international partners.
Last year President Zelenskyy, encouraged by members of his inner circle who themselves faced potential scrutiny from NABU and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO), "authorised" the attack on Ukraine's anti-corruption institutions. Now it was largely that same circle of trusted advisers who convinced the president to dismiss Svyrydenko's government in order to get rid of the increasingly troublesome defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. In their view, Fedorov had become too aggressive in excluding shadowy industrial groups from defence procurement contracts and was, as they put it, "clearly playing politics".
The wave of public protests and an unusually candid press briefing by Fedorov generated such a powerful media reaction that the appointment of the new government and the start of its work went almost unnoticed. Although Prime Minister Koretskyi had no involvement in the decision to dismiss the popular defence minister, his government's performance is now being judged largely through the prism of the conflict surrounding the Defence Ministry.
That is not entirely fair, however, because this will be far from the only challenge facing the new administration.
Ukrainska Pravda has already examined the causes, key players and consequences of the Defence Ministry scandal. In this article, we take a look at the main challenges confronting Koretskyi's government and consider who is likely to influence the new prime minister and how his strengths and weaknesses will shape the work of his government.
The president's choice
Koretskyi's appointment is perhaps the first clear sign of a development that many within the corridors of power had anticipated with a degree of apprehension: the president has begun selecting people on his own, without advice from anyone else.
Zelenskyy's first prime minister, Oleksii Honcharuk, was brought into the team by Andrii Bohdan, then head of the President's Office; Denys Shmyhal became PM with the backing of Davyd Arakhamiia, leader of Zelenskyy's parliamentary faction; Yuliia Svyrydenko owed her appointment to the active support of Andrii Yermak. Koretskyi is the first prime minister chosen entirely by Zelenskyy.
"This was his choice. Recently, the president and the first lady have taken a number of young and promising public-sector managers under their wing. They've been working with them on various projects and, so to speak, keeping a close eye on them," one senior member of the president's team, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Ukrainska Pravda.
According to the source, Koretskyi was one of those managers. For quite some time, the president had been observing how the CEO of first Ukrnafta and later Naftogaz responded to challenges, the decisions he made, and the projects he put forward.
"This is actually the first prime minister whom nobody lobbied into the job," another Ukrainska Pravda source close to the president explained. "He's genuinely a CEO hired from the market whom the president personally selected. Koretskyi is a pure technocrat who suited everyone precisely because he wasn't aligned with any particular group."
Of course, Zelenskyy also approved every previous prime minister and every member of the Cabinet, and exercised direct influence over each of them. Nevertheless, Koretskyi's appointment is unique.
For the first time, Ukraine has a prime minister with no background in politics whatsoever. There is a certain paradox in that.
The Cabinet of Ministers is, above all, a political body. The role of a government is to implement the programme of the political parties that formed the governing coalition, relying on a politically neutral civil service and state bureaucracy to do so.
Yet in the seventh year of Zelenskyy's presidency and the term of the current parliament, Ukraine has a prime minister who is not merely unaffiliated with the ruling majority but has no connection to politics at all.
That's neither good nor bad, just a statement of the current situation. In effect, the Cabinet has evolved into a presidential executive body that is formally endorsed through parliamentary voting.
"What we have now is essentially a client – or owner, if you like – in the form of the president, and a hired CEO serving as prime minister. That's the model we're operating under now," is how one influential member of the Servant of the People party summed up the situation.
It's important to understand this in order to appreciate another noteworthy aspect of Koretskyi's appointment: the new prime minister has virtually no team of his own within the government.
"He's the first truly corporate prime minister. He's coming into government with just one person of his own [the economy minister – ed.] who he was allowed to bring with him. But when a CEO joins a company, they don't arrive with 15 new board members. They work with the team that's already there. And it's their job to build relationships to ensure that the organisation functions and delivers results," a government source told Ukrainska Pravda, explaining the new governing philosophy.
Like Koretskyi, Yuliia Svyrydenko did not appear to have strong personal political ambitions. But she was very much a product of Ukraine's civil service, having worked her way up through every level – from deputy regional governor to positions in the ministry and the President's Office – before eventually becoming prime minister.
Koretskyi, by contrast, is entering the system of government for the first time and going straight into its highest level.
On the one hand, this gives him an opportunity to introduce a genuinely corporate management culture into public administration, if only because he has never worked within the traditional bureaucratic culture and is therefore not shaped by it.
On the other hand, that corporate background could prove to be his greatest vulnerability.
After all, a government is not a company. A state is about far more than profit, efficiency or dividends. Like it or not, the office of prime minister is an inherently political one.
"The prime minister has already changed the atmosphere inside the Cabinet considerably," one long-serving Cabinet official observed. "Unlike Svyrydenko, he works with almost no emotion at all – it's pure pragmatism and a cool-headed approach. He assigns tasks, hears about problems and proposes solutions. That's how he's used to working in the corporate world. But he's in for a shock when he discovers that some of his instructions simply won't be carried out and will vanish into the labyrinths of bureaucracy. In a company, he'd just dismiss those managers and hire new ones. He can't do that in government, because ministers are appointed by parliament, not by him."
Last week the new prime minister reportedly had a lengthy conversation about precisely this issue with Ruslan Stefanchuk, Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada.
According to Ukrainska Pravda sources who witnessed the meeting, one of the speaker's main pieces of advice for Koretskyi was to find an experienced and capable lawyer as soon as possible.
"Koretskyi urgently needs someone he trusts who can tell him, professionally and honestly: this can be done, this can't, this needs to be handled differently, and this isn't worth getting involved in at all," a parliamentary source familiar with the conversation told Ukrainska Pravda. "The prime minister is only just beginning to grasp the scale of the system. Before long, that realisation may turn into genuine astonishment at just how vast the whole machine really is."
Sources close to the prime minister insist that he understands the importance of maintaining control over the system.
"He will definitely preserve everything that is working effectively. Where something needs strengthening – or, conversely, removing – he won't hesitate to make quick decisions," a member of Koretskyi's team said.
For now, the Cabinet Secretariat remains staffed by the team that served under Yuliia Svyrydenko. Meanwhile, Koretskyi has assembled a small circle of economists and advisers, including former deputy economy minister Denys Kudin and former MP Oleksii Riabchyn, who worked with him in the energy sector, have government experience, and could potentially join his team.
"Koretskyi builds strong teams fairly quickly. He has a clear set of criteria by which he assesses people and decides who to trust: professionalism, integrity and accountability. Each minister is expected to deliver results in their own area. If they don't, heads will roll," a source close to Koretskyi's team told Ukrainska Pravda confidently.
"When Shmyhal became prime minister, he too arrived with almost no people of his own in government," one senior member of the president's team told Ukrainska Pravda. "Yet within a few months he managed to put together a more or less united team, winning some people over personally and others through the machinery of government. A prime minister's formal powers are limited, but most government business still passes through that office, and that gives you leverage."
In other words, Koretskyi does have tools with which he can try to persuade a politically diverse group of ministers – many of whom barely know him – to implement the priority objectives set out in the government's programme.
Which brings us to the programme itself. The second piece of advice Stefanchuk reportedly gave the new prime minister was to draw up a concise but specific government programme as quickly as possible, submit it to parliament, and secure enough votes for its approval. Koretskyi himself announced during his first few days in office that ministries had already been instructed to submit proposals for a new programme of action.
Speaking to Ukrainska Pravda, Koretskyi said he had already set a clear timeline.
"The government's programme will be submitted to the Verkhovna Rada within 30 days. During my first week in office, I instructed all ministries to prepare their proposals. They are now being reviewed. We expect to complete the internal drafting process by 5 August and submit the document to the Cabinet for approval. Each policy area will include three to five clearly defined priorities, with specific deadlines, responsible officials and measurable outcomes," the prime minister said.
First of all, the programme will give both politicians and the public at least a rough idea of what the change of prime minister is meant to achieve and what to expect from the new Cabinet.
Secondly, parliamentary approval will grant the government a year of immunity from dismissal, providing at least a degree of stability and predictability. Svyrydenko's experience (her programme was submitted late and never approved) has demonstrated that such guarantees are far from meaningless.
Ukrainska Pravda has also learned that Koretskyi has decided to place particular emphasis on the relationship with parliament right from the start. Every member of the Cabinet received a signed letter from him instructing them to significantly improve communication with the Verkhovna Rada.
"The prime minister has already introduced new rules for ministers. They are now required to present government bills in person, attend key parliamentary sessions, work actively with the relevant committees, and ensure MPs are invited to attend government meetings and join regional working visits," sources in Koretskyi's team explained to Ukrainska Pravda.
A baptism of fire
Even before the new Cabinet was approved, it was clear just how difficult its job would be.
To understand the level of tension around the process, it is worth noting that on the very day the coalition approved its nominations and parliament convened to vote on the new Cabinet, some MPs began receiving calls from influential people in various state-owned institutions urging them either to withdraw the submission or vote it down.
It was a last-minute attempt by acting Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko and his allies in government to replace the coalition's nominee for interior minister – National Police chief Ivan Vyhivskyi – with Klymenko.
Within the space of a single day, Klymenko unexpectedly found himself pushed out of the political process despite having been regarded as a relatively successful minister.
The most shocking part for Klymenko, however, was that the issue was not his own performance, but his refusal to get involved in the biggest political scandal of recent months – the attempt to oust Mykhailo Fedorov as defence minister.
Ukrainska Pravda has already reported on the reasons behind the conflict within the Defence Ministry. The key point here is that as the new government enters the critical autumn and winter phase of the war, it will have no appointed defence or foreign ministers for at least a month (!), since parliament is not expected to reconvene until 18 August.
This can safely be described as one of the Cabinet's greatest challenges – and certainly its most pressing.
Although President Zelenskyy has repeatedly insisted in interviews that the reshuffle was intended to improve cooperation between the government and the armed forces, in its current form those "improvements" could prove disastrous.
Defence procurement and technological development operate on timelines measured in months. Any missed opportunities to purchase equipment today will have appalling consequences in two, three or four months' time – just as winter approaches.
Over the past six months, Fedorov has carried out a comprehensive overhaul of both planning and procurement at the Defence Ministry. The system had only just started to adapt to these new principles. No one knows how those reforms will now proceed.
What will happen to the ongoing weapons tenders, the new procurement evaluation procedures, arms exports, governance reforms, the recruitment of foreign nationals, mobilisation, the new contracts, pay rises, and the many other initiatives already launched? No one has any answers.
One of the country's key institutions, on which Ukraine's very survival as a state depends, has effectively been left in limbo.
The defence minister is appointed under the president's quota, so the prime minister is unlikely to have any direct influence over the appointment. Yet any future failures in the defence sector will inevitably reflect on the PM as well.
Koretskyi's own team is aware of these risks. Sources close to the new prime minister say their immediate priority is to "ensure there is no interruption whatsoever in the work of the defence sector and maintain continuity across all ongoing processes".
Whoever becomes defence minister – even someone as distinguished a combat officer as Yevhen Khmara – will inevitably face a huge range of issues requiring an entirely different skillset once they assume political office.
Being appointed minister doesn't automatically come with an understanding of the bureaucracy, the defence industry, procurement procedures, cooperation with manufacturers and international partners, and dozens of other complexities.
Learning about all that takes time. And time is not on Ukraine's side.
The second major challenge facing the new PM and his Cabinet was outlined by Zelenskyy himself in the run-up to the government reshuffle: getting Ukraine's energy sector and regions ready for winter.
The President's Office clearly recognises now that the rapid elections it had at one stage been discussing and preparing for are not feasible. Neither Valerii Zaluzhnyi nor Kyrylo Budanov was willing to withdraw from consideration.
Moreover, the heavy-handed attempt to remove Fedorov has done nothing to diminish the number of potential candidates capable of challenging Zelenskyy – if anything, it's increased.
As a result, elections have receded into the background, and another scenario has become increasingly apparent: the war will grind on, extending, at the very least, into the autumn and winter.
For the past month, Russian forces have been systematically attacking petrol stations, storage facilities and energy infrastructure. Through missile and drone strikes, they are attempting to undermine Ukraine's ability to sustain normal life both along the front line and deep in the rear.
So protecting the energy system and preparing for the heating season will be among the government's top priorities. But first the country has to make it to winter. And every week the Russians present new – and increasingly serious – challenges.
"We have already begun a comprehensive audit of the implementation of the Resilience Plan," a source in Koretskyi's team told Ukrainska Pravda. "Unfortunately we can see a number of significant shortcomings that need to be promptly addressed. By the end of this week we'll have a complete picture for every region: what's been done, where there are still gaps, and which decisions need to be taken as a matter of urgency."
Another major challenge already facing Koretskyi's Cabinet is Russia's attempt to use missile and drone strikes to disrupt the operation of Ukraine's ports.
The most important period of the year for Ukrainian exports – the grain harvest – has now begun.
If Russia succeeds in significantly restricting grain exports, simultaneously destroying grain elevators and other storage facilities, Ukraine could face a major economic crisis.
This would deprive the country of substantial foreign currency earnings and export revenues. Domestically, the resulting shortage of foreign currency could trigger a sharp depreciation of the hryvnia and a surge in prices.
"The situation is objectively difficult, but the government is already working on diversification. Diplomatic efforts are ongoing. Most importantly, our military continues its work," a source in Koretskyi's team assured Ukrainska Pravda.
The new PM will have to tackle all these problems right off the bat – and, for the time being, without a defence minister.
***
"Serhii is very thoughtful and perceptive as a manager," one senior executive who used to work with Koretskyi in the energy sector says of the new PM. "He has a talent for quickly grasping the essence of a problem. He tries to listen to everyone, gather as much input as possible, weigh it up carefully, and only then make a decision.
He takes time to analyse things, but ultimately seeks the most effective and optimal solution.
In the corporate world that has always been a strength, because it helps avoid impulsive decisions that can prove costly for a company. In politics, however, this approach may turn out to be a weakness. Politics often demands instant decisions.
They may turn out to be wrong. They can be revised, adjusted or even reversed later. But the response itself has to be swift," the source adds.
It's hard to disagree with that. Ukraine's political history has seen more than a few instances where delaying a decision by a day – or even just a few hours – came at a very high cost.
Political leadership is rarely like running a company, where there are long-established corporate procedures that provide a framework for decision-making. Politics demands decisiveness, a willingness to take risks, and the ability to act asymmetrically.
"Koretskyi is a very creative person," one senior member of the president's team told Ukrainska Pravda. "The ideas he's been putting forward so far are quite bold. We'll just have to see how well Serhii will cope with the bureaucratic hierarchy, which has clipped the wings of more than one bold reformer. Quite literally, everything will depend on that."
Roman Romaniuk, Ukrainska Pravda
Translated by Myroslava Zavadska
Edited by Teresa Pearce