The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s Parliament, accepted the resignation of the country’s Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov on Tuesday, with 327 of the body’s 450 deputies voting to support his decision to step down.
Reznikov, who has served as Ukraine’s defence minister since November 2021, announced on Monday that he had submitted his resignation to the Rada. Reznikov said that it had been “an honour to serve the Ukrainian people and work for the Ukrainian Army for the last 22 months, the toughest period of Ukraine’s modern history”.
On Sunday Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky named Rustem Umerov as his choice for the country’s new defence minister, saying that the Ukrainian Defence Ministry was in need of “new approaches and other means of interaction with both the military and society at large”.
Umerov, who is a deputy in the Verkhovna Rada and head of the State Property Fund of Ukraine, was also a member of the team that attempted to negotiate with Russia in the weeks following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. His appointment as defence minister must now be confirmed by the Ukrainian parliament.
