Denys Shmyhal posted a photo of his resignation letter to Telegram on Tuesday, July 15, 2025, ending five years as Ukraine’s prime minister. “Thank you to the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, for the trust,” he wrote, alongside thanks to the defenders holding the front.
The letter followed a proposal made the day before. On July 14, Zelensky put forward Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko to run the government and told the cabinet to “significantly renew its work”, according to the Kyiv Independent. He did not say why. Shmyhal, in the meantime, was offered the defense portfolio, with Zelensky telling him his experience would be useful there, the Kyiv Post reported.
How the vote was meant to work
Parliament was due to vote on dismissing the government on July 16, with a ballot on the new cabinet planned for the day after. Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a lawmaker from the opposition Holos party, confirmed that timetable to the Kyiv Independent, which noted that the schedule came from Zelensky’s Servant of the People party.
The numbers favored the president. Servant of the People holds at least 231 of the 450 seats in the Verkhovna Rada. Ukrainian law gives lawmakers up to 30 days to choose a new prime minister once a resignation is accepted.
A legal wrinkle sat in the background. A prime minister’s resignation normally dissolves the whole cabinet, but Article 10 of the law on the legal regime of martial law bars the cabinet’s powers from ending while martial law applies, the Kyiv Post noted.
Who goes where
Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, whom Zelensky appointed in September 2023, was reportedly being weighed for a different job: ambassador to the United States. Reports on July 10 had already suggested he might replace Oksana Markarova in Washington.
The membership of the new cabinet had not been made public. Zelensky did lay out priorities on July 15, when he met Svyrydenko and Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov to set goals for the government’s next six months. He listed “increasing domestic weapons production in Ukraine, fully contracting the required volumes of all types of drones for Ukraine’s Defense Forces, carrying out substantial deregulation and unlocking our country’s internal economic potential.”
A long run in office
Talk of replacing Shmyhal had circulated since the previous summer. Zelensky changed several officials in September 2024 and left him in place, which made Shmyhal the longest-serving prime minister in Ukraine’s history, the Kyiv Independent said.
Before taking the top job in 2020, Shmyhal served briefly as deputy prime minister and minister for communities and territories development in Oleksiy Honcharuk’s government, during February and March of that year. In 2019 and 2020 he ran the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional State Administration. Earlier he worked for companies tied to Rinat Akhmetov and, from 2015 to 2017, was chief executive of the retailer Lvivkholod. He trained as an engineer-economist at Lviv Polytechnic and holds a doctorate in economics.
Sources
- Ukraine's Prime Minister Submits Resignation, Parliament Set to Dismiss Government on July 16
- Ukraine's Prime Minister Shmyhal Resigns After 5 Years
