The Verkhovna Rada named Andriy Zahorodniuk as Ukraine’s new defense minister, part of a new government led by the new Prime Minister Olesksiy Honcharuk approved by the fresh parliament in its formal first sitting on Aug. 29.
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Zahorodniuk, 44, is to succeed Stepan Poltorak, a retired top-ranking military officer who had served as the country’s 14th defense minister since October 2014 in cabinets of Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Volodymyr Groysman.
Prior to his nomination, Zahorodniuk in 2019 was known as a non-staff adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky and also as one of five members in the Supervisory Board of the UkrOboronProm, a state-run military production giant.
In its address to the Rada, the new defense minister set out his agenda, stressing that the nation needs to “move from words to deeds” in military reforms and “to transform the army in compliance to NATO standards.”
“The first priority is to turn the state policy’s face to an average military service-person,” Zahorodniuk said.
“Issues of equipment supplies, (massive) discharges from ranks, special provisioning, and discipline, and how military personnel views themselves in the armed forces, are especially acute.”
He also stressed on combating corruption in the defense sector as his priority.
“Everybody knows thievery take the place in the army, and the people are tired of his issue. There must be no corruption in the army.”
He described the defense ministry’s main function as “making sure our citizens can sleep peacefully.”
Zaharodnuik has a profound background in mining industry management.
According to the Ukrinform news agency, he graduated the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, as well as the University of Warwick and the Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Since 2005, he is known to be heading the Discovery Drilling Equipment company producing various drilling facilities in Ukraine.
With the outbreak of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014, Zahorodnuik started rendering volunteer aid for the Ukrainian Armed Forces combating Russian-backed militants in Donbas. In particular, his company provided Ukrainian combat formations with potbelly stoves and armored cash transit vehicles rearranged as battlefield ambulances.
He subsequently became a member of the Reform Project Office, an alliance of nearly 40 well-known civilian volunteers, businesspersons, and activists developing reform projects for Defense Ministry in military procurement, food supplies for troops, and policymaking.
In compliance with National Security Law approved in June 2018, a Ukrainian defense minister must be appointed “from civilian life” in accordance with principles of civilian control and oversight of the military, the doctrine that Ukraine assumed as part of its Western-oriented 2020 defense sector reform.
Along with defense minister, the Rada on Aug. 29 also made new appointments to other key security sector offices. In particular, the parliament eventually approved lawyer the nomination of Ivan Bakanov, a long-time friend of president Zelensky, as the new chief of the SBU security service.
Two other government agencies – the Ministry for Veteran Affairs and the Ministry for Occupied Territories and Internally Dispaced Persons were merged under the leadership of Oksana Kolyada, a former Defense Ministry press service head.
At the same time, the new Rada also reappointed the controversial interior affairs minister Arsen Avakov widely criticized for corruption scandals he had been involved, as well as over his allegedly failed reform of the country’s police and numerous deadly attacks on civil activists, such as Kateryna Handziuk, that, according to critics, were met with no effective reaction from the Interior Ministry leadership.
Nonetheless, according to David Arakhamia, the Servant of the People fraction leader, Avakov would stay in office for another 6 months “for a transition period” under “personal responsibility” of president Zelensky.”
