 "Ukraine Parliament speaker chosen to head new government")
Ukraine's Parliament has approved a new pro-EU government headed by Parliament Speaker Volodymyr Groysman to replace the Cabinet of prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who resigned at the weekend, officials said.
The pro-western coalition in power "has backed the candidature of Groysman for the post of prime minister", a spokesman for another candidate, Dmytro Stolarchuk, said on Twitter, with several parliamentarians confirming the decision which was thrashed out over days of fraught debate.
The new prime minister and his team are expected to be formally named on Wednesday, said parliamentary deputy Maksim Bourbak.
Read more from our special coverage on "UKRAINE"
Parliament had agreed on who should head up all the ministries, with the exception of the health ministry, the deputies added.
Ukraine has been gripped by a months-long political crisis that forced Yatsenyuk to resign on Sunday over his seeming failure to fight graft and implement economic restructuring measures prescribed by the International Monetary Fund under a $17.5-billion (15.4-billion-euro) rescue deal.
Also Read
The release of new tranches of that money and billions of dollars of other aid have been suspended until the former Soviet republic can unite behind a new government and fulfil the pledges made during its historic February 2014 pro-EU revolt.
The leaders who succeeded ousted Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovych have seen their approval ratings plunge due to public disillusionment about their ability to break a handful of tycoons' grip on politics and eliminate corruption.
The pro-EU coalition that formed after the so-called Maidan Revolution has since cracked and forced the parties led by current President Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk – parliament's two largest – to enlist a handful of other lawmakers to make sure that a new government is approved.
The political mayhem comes against the backdrop of a two-year-old pro-Russian rebellion in the separatist east that has claimed nearly 9,200 lives.
Russia denies charges by Kiev and its Western allies of orchestrating and supporting the insurgency in reprisal for Ukraine's pivot away from Moscow towards the West.
The negotiations between the two main parties on the composition of the new government had carried on for days.
Lists of potential Cabinet members published by Ukrainian media and cited by lawmakers excluded the three foreigners Poroshenko called up in December 2014 to help the country recover from its dramatic economic slide.
These included widely-respected Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, a US-born former State Department worker and private banker who won plaudits for being able to pull off a crucial debt restructuring deal in August 2015.
"Yatsenyuk's resignation will create more risks for Poroshenko's rule," analyst Mikhail Minakov of Carnegie Europe wrote in a report.