Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has nominated acting Defense Minister Yevhen Khmara to hold the crucial wartime job on a permanent basis, lawmakers said, one month after his dismissal of a popular figure from the post sparked street protests.
Zelenskyy abruptly fired Mykhaylo Fedorov on July 15 amid a dispute between the tech-savvy defense chief and the top military commander, General Oleksandr Syrskiy, who was himself dismissed by the president days later after more than two years in the role.
Lawmakers in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, said on July 18 that Zelenskyy had submitted his nomination of Khmara, a major general who had been acting chief of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) since January.
A vote is expected on the nomination of Khmara and the renomination of Andriy Sybiha, who has been foreign minister since September 2024. That is a necessary step because Zelenskyy triggered the full cabinet’s resignation when he pushed Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko out on July 12; she was replaced by Serhiy Koretskiy.
The shakeups come as Ukraine fights to defend itself against Russia’s full-scale invasion while facing a glaring shortage of air-defense missiles, due in part to a decline in supplies of US-made Patriot systems since the start of the US-Israeli war with Iran in February.
Russian missiles fired overnight damaged private homes, a cafe, a post office, a shop and several cars in the town of Pechenihiy in the eastern Kharkiv region, killing 10 people and injuring eight others, the head of the regional military administration, Oleh Synyehubov, said on Telegram.
Later on August 18, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it was told by the director of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, that a drone hit a bus stop used by plant staff and subcontractors at about 6 a.m., killing one person and injuring 15 others, three of them seriously.
“No nuclear safety or security damage was reported,” the IAEA said in a post on X.
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi “calls on military commanders responsible for these actions as well as all others aiming on nuclear power plants and/or their staff to put an immediate stop to these unacceptable actions which…constitute great risks to nuclear safety and security during the conflict,” the post said.
Russia blamed Ukraine for the drone hit. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv.
The Zaporizhzhya plant is Europe’s largest nuclear power station, with six reactors. Russian forces seized it shortly after Moscow launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022, and Ukraine and Russia have traded accusations of shelling and other actions threatening the safety of the plant, which lies across the Dnieper River from Ukrainian-held territory.
A Russian drone hit a combine harvester at a separate location in the Zaporizhzhya region on August 18, killing one farm worker and injuring another, Ukrainian officials said.
