Volodymyr Zelenskyy assigned Yevhen Khmara to perform the Defence Minister's duties on 16 July, pending a confirmation vote in the Verkhovna Rada1. Khmara is the acting head of the SBU, Ukraine's domestic security and intelligence service, and previously commanded its Alpha Special Operations Centre. Zelenskyy cited his record in long-range strike operations.
The succession went wrong in public before it landed there. Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko was floated for the post between 13 and 15 July, declined it, and took the National Security and Defence Council secretary role instead. Ukraine therefore spent a day with its defence portfolio openly unfilled, and now has an acting minister whose confirmation is a parliamentary question rather than a settled one.
What Khmara brings is a special-operations record, and what he inherits is an administrative machine. The ministry's hardest open file is mobilisation: recruitment shortfalls, brigade formation, and the churn of infantry that neither deep strikes nor intelligence work touches. Russian officials were themselves discussing a fresh mobilisation wave for October, which sets a rough deadline on how long Kyiv has to fix its own intake before the arithmetic on the other side changes. Alpha runs small teams under short chains of command, compartmented from one another by design. Conscription policy runs the opposite way, through recruitment centres, courts and local administrations, and it is exactly the part of the job Fedorov was dismissed for not solving.
