# Dmytro Kuleba Dmytro Ivanovych Kuleba (born April 19, 1981, in Sumy) is a Ukrainian career diplomat who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine from March 2020 to September 2024 — the wartime chief diplomat who, for the duration of Russia's full-scale invasion, was second only to President [[Volodymyr Zelensky]] in carrying Ukraine's case to the outside world. He graduated with honors in international law from the Institute of International Relations of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2003 and rose through the foreign ministry, serving as Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe (2016–2019) and then as Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration before taking the top diplomatic post. He resigned on September 4, 2024, as part of the largest cabinet reshuffle of the war, and did not publicly state a reason. Since leaving office he has held positions in the West, including a non-resident senior fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center (announced December 2024) and an associate professorship at Sciences Po in Paris (from January 2025), where he teaches wartime diplomacy. He continues to reside in Kyiv and remains one of the most-quoted Ukrainian voices on the trajectory of the war. ## Relevance to the KB Kuleba is not a figure of the right; he matters in this knowledge base as a primary diplomatic foil to the MAGA and tech-right foreign-policy turn on Ukraine (see [[The Tech Right Hub]]). Where figures like [[David Sacks]] and [[JD Vance]] advanced the "Russia was provoked" / "Ukraine should concede" line, Kuleba is the articulate counter-case: that Russia's strength is overstated and contingent, that Western hesitation manufactured Putin's aura of inevitability, and that pressure-plus-support remains the only workable strategy. His characteristic argument is that Russia is weaker than its image — closer to the "paper tiger" framing that [[Donald Trump]] himself would later adopt in September 2025 (though Trump's phrase, which Putin publicly mocked, is the U.S. president's, not Kuleba's). Kuleba's own formulation is sharper on the mechanism: in a February 2026 Al Jazeera interview he argued that "Russia is not strong on its own. It is strong because it has China behind its back" — locating Russian power in its dependence on Beijing rather than in any inherent strength. In his December 2024 Belfer Center interview he framed Putin's deeper aim as exposing "the weakness of the West to the whole world," warning that a Western failure in Ukraine would push hesitant states to "bow their heads to China." See [[Dmytro Kuleba - Russia is not strong on its own]] for the receipt. ## Positions On NATO, Kuleba has been categorical that membership is the only durable security guarantee for Ukraine — arguing, counterintuitively, that bringing Ukraine into the alliance is also the only way to contain a future generation of Ukrainian "revanchism." This places him at the center of the [[Ukraine NATO Accession Debate]] and in direct opposition to the spheres-of-influence logic favored by the isolationist right. On negotiations, he has consistently held that Russia does not negotiate in good faith and that any peace short of recognizing Ukraine as an independent, European nation simply defers the next war. ## See Also - [[Russo-Ukrainian War]] - [[Ukraine NATO Accession Debate]] - [[Volodymyr Zelensky]] - [[Vladimir Putin]] - [[Dmytro Kuleba - Russia is not strong on its own]]