Ukraine and Russia have carried out another exchange of the remains of fallen soldiers, both sides say, as MPs in Kyiv confirmed Sergii Koretskyi as the country's new prime minister.
Ukraine received the bodies of 501 Ukrainian troops, the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War in Ukraine said.
Russian media reported that authorities in Moscow received the remains of 31 Russian soldiers.
Since the beginning of 2025, Ukraine has recovered the remains of nearly 21,000 fallen service members while Russia has received about 660 bodies in return.
The large disparity has been attributed to the steady advance of Russian forces, which has often left Ukrainian troops unable to recover their dead from the battlefield.
Ukraine has been defending itself against Russia's full-scale invasion since February 2022.
Both sides keep their military casualty figures classified.
But based on publicly available obituaries and other open-source data, estimates put the number of Ukrainian military deaths at about 200,000 while Russian military losses are estimated at 350,000.
Ukraine's parliament approved a new government on Thursday under new Prime Minister Koretskyi.
Koretskyi - the former head of the state-run energy company Naftogaz -received 289 votes in parliament, well above the necessary 226.
The vote does not include defence and foreign ministers, who under Ukraine's system are proposed by the president.
An extraordinary outburst by outgoing Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov laid bare a rift at the heart of Ukraine's war effort, pitting a new guard pushing technology as the way to defeat Russia against the head of the armed forces.
The 35-year-old, who was ousted this week in a government overhaul just six months into his job, aimed a blistering tirade at General Oleksandr Syrskyi, whom he accused of stirring up intrigue, blocking his initiatives and sabotaging his work.
It is the first time the tensions have burst into the public eye.
Fedorov said he had agreed to make things work with Syrskyi after unsuccessfully petitioning President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to replace him but that Ukraine's top general had taken to deliberately undermining him behind the scenes.
"We hit a situation where all the initiatives we proposed were blocked, and Syrskyi, considering all the problems we discussed today, is not ready to look (me) in the eye and talk openly about the problems," Fedorov said.
He accused Syrskyi of presiding over a dysfunctional culture of lies, poorly organised units and lack of personal responsibility in the military - astonishing rhetoric to level at the man who has led the Ukrainian armed forces since February 2024.
"Instead of working out how to asymmetrically defeat Russia ... he has worked out how to split the country," he told a news conference that came just as MPs were meeting to discuss the composition of a new cabinet.
Afterwards, Syrskyi issued a short statement in which he thanked Fedorov for his work as defence minister and said that Ukraine needed to focus on the war.
Fedorov has overseen a ramp-up in production of middle-range and deep strike drones and smoothed out defence procurement.
Hundreds of Ukrainians came out to support Fedorov at a rare wartime demonstration in Kyiv on Thursday.
In his remarks, Fedorov paid tribute to Syrskyi's past military triumphs but said that "the war has totally changed" and that drones were driving a rapid cycle of evolution.
Zelenskiy confirmed that there was a rift between the two men as he made some of his first public comments, adding that he was not in a position to say how it would be resolved.
Alongside the role of technology and notably drones, championed by Fedorov, a key focus for Ukraine's military has been the shortage of infantry soldiers, something neither the military nor the defence ministry has been able to overcome.
Zelenskiy said that Ihor Klymenko, the interior minister tipped as a possible successor to Fedorov, might be well placed to deal with the problem of draft officers dragging civilian men off onto buses to serve in the armed forces.
The phenomenon - popularly known as "bus-ification" - is deeply unpopular and has stoked social tensions throughout the war.
with Reuters