Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy mentioned Sunday that protection minister Oleksii Reznikov will likely be changed this week with Rustem Umierov, a Crimean Tatar lawmaker.
Zelenskyy made the announcement on his official Telegram account.
“I’ve determined to exchange the Minister of Protection of Ukraine. Oleksii Reznikov has gone via greater than 550 days of full-scale warfare. I imagine that the Ministry wants new approaches and different codecs of interplay with each the army and society at massive. Now Rustem Umierov ought to lead the Ministry,” he mentioned.
Umierov, 41, a politician with the opposition Holos get together, has served as head of the State Property Fund of Ukraine since September 2022. He was concerned within the change of prisoners of warfare, political prisoners, youngsters and civilians, in addition to the evacuation of civilians from occupied territories. Umierov was additionally a part of the Ukrainian delegation in negotiations with Russia over the U.N.-backed grain deal.
The announcement got here after two individuals have been hospitalized following a 3½-hour Russian drone barrage on a port in Ukraine’s Odesa area on Sunday, officers mentioned.
The assault on the Reni seaport comes a day earlier than Russian President Vladimir Putin is because of meet along with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to debate the resumption of meals shipments from Ukraine underneath a Black Sea grain settlement that Moscow broke off from in July.
Russian forces fired 25 Iranian-made Shahed drones alongside the Danube River within the early hours of Sunday, 22 of which have been shot down by air defenses, the Ukrainian air pressure mentioned on Telegram.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ‘s chief of employees, Andriy Yermak, described the assault as a part of a Russian drive “to impress a meals disaster and starvation on the earth.”
Russia’s Protection Ministry mentioned in a press release that the assault was aimed toward gasoline storage services used to provide army tools.
SEE MORE: Largest assault on Russia in 18 months: Drones take goal at 6 targets
Putin and Erdogan’s long-awaited assembly is because of happen in Sochi on Russia’s southwest coast on Monday.
Turkish officers have confirmed that the pair will talk about renewing the Black Sea grain initiative, which the Kremlin pulled out of six weeks in the past.
The deal — brokered by the United Nations and Turkey in July 2022 — had allowed almost 33 million metric tons (36 million tons) of grain and different commodities to depart three Ukrainian ports safely regardless of Russia’s warfare.
Nevertheless, Russia broke away from the settlement after claiming {that a} parallel deal promising to take away obstacles to Russian exports of meals and fertilizer hadn’t been honored.
Moscow complained that restrictions on delivery and insurance coverage hampered its agricultural commerce, though it has shipped document quantities of wheat since final 12 months.
The Sochi summit follows talks between the Russian and Turkish overseas ministers on Thursday, throughout which Russia handed over an inventory of actions that the West must take to ensure that Ukraine’s Black Sea exports to renew.
Erdogan has indicated sympathy with Putin’s place. In July, he mentioned Putin had “sure expectations from Western international locations” over the Black Sea deal and that it was “essential for these international locations to take motion on this regard.”
Elsewhere in Ukraine, three individuals have been killed in two separate assaults by Russian shelling within the Donetsk space Sunday. An 85-year-old man was named among the many victims after being crushed by the rubble of his own residence, Ukraine’s Prosecutors’ Workplace reported.
A 36-year-old man was additionally killed in one other Russian assault on Ukraine’s Kherson area.
Ukrainian prosecutors introduced Sunday that they’d opened a warfare crimes investigation into the demise of a police officer killed by Russian shelling in town of Seredyna-Buda on Saturday afternoon.
Two different cops and one civilian have been wounded in the course of the assault, which hit Ukraine’s north-eastern Sumy area.
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