The Christmas wreaths are hanging from the windows of the Corinthia hotel in Whitehall. But there is nothing festive about the news from Ukraine. Scanning the newspaper as I wait for Dmytro Kuleba, I read that Russia has just hit the city of Dnipro with a ballistic missile.

Until a couple of months ago, Kuleba was Ukraine’s foreign minister. I first met him in Kyiv in 2023. There were sandbags and fortifications surrounding his ministry, but he was strikingly relaxed and funny — a living refutation of old clichés about a backward country run by post-Soviet apparatchiks. 

In September, Kuleba, who had been foreign minister for four years, resigned from the government. He has not commented publicly on his departure. But the general assumption is that he was pushed out — as strains and tensions mount in the inner circle of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, under the pressure of a faltering war effort.