It seem that the "nothing changed" answer, which I initially accepted at face value, may not be quite so. While the nominal figure heads were left in place, it seems Russia has done "changes under the hood" this summer, e.g. in the DPR:
First Deputy Chief of Staff Sergei Kiriyenko’s grandiloquent recent visit to the region left no doubt that he has been given responsibility for the region instead of Deputy Chief of Staff Dmitry Kozak, who has become far less visible since the start of the war, and has most likely fallen out of favor in the Kremlin. The DPR’s new prime minister is Vitaly Khotsenko, a finalist in the Leaders of Russia management competition, a brainchild of Kiriyenko. Khotsenko’s appointment as head of the DPR government was followed by an influx of other Russian bureaucrats to leadership positions in both republics, and more such appointments are certain to follow.
The second factor is the final departure from office in the republics of fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Sergei Kurchenko’s protégés (he disappeared from the radar back at the start of the invasion, having been sanctioned by the EU). This process began last year, when the Russian businessman Yevgeny Yurchenko was appointed as the new boss of industry in the Donbas.
Such reshuffles may lead to more competent governance in Donbas—as far as possible under conditions of war. For all their faults, former Russian deputy governors and deputy ministers could be considered a vast improvement in terms of the managerial skills needed for civilian bureaucracy compared with the local field commanders who had clawed their way to power in the republics. [...]
Amid this change in government, the fate of the Donbas’s most high-profile politician, DPR leader Denis Pushilin, is particularly interesting. An apparent master of political survival, he is just about the only one left from the original lineup of the leaders of the “Russian spring” to remain in power.
It's interesting the spin that TASS put on that move. Their headline was "Kremlin respects DPR leader’s decision to reshuffle republic’s government". But Khotsenko is clearly a Russian politician whose only prior ties to the DPR (even TASS failed to identify any), seem to be claiming Dnipro[petrovsk] as his birth place, while most of his career, like that of his father, being tied to the Yamalo-Nenets Okrug (in Siberia).
But in a "concidentally" timed move,
Leonid Pasechnik, leader of the Lugansk People’s Republic, on Thursday appointed ex-Deputy Governor of Russia’s Kurgan Region Vladislav Kuznetsov First Deputy Chairman of the LPR’s government.
As there's not much of a biography of Kuznetsov I could find in English (except this, where we find out he was also a member of the Bashkortorstan parliament) his prior relationship with Luhansk [if any] is even more obscure.
