Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 30 appointed Natalia Halibarenko as head of the mission of Ukraine to NATO, according to a presidential decree published on the website of the president’s office.
The position has been vacant since Aug. 2019. The last appointed head of Ukraine’s mission to NATO was Vadym Prystaiko, who served as head from Sept. 2017 to Aug. 2019.
After Prystaiko’s departure, Oleksiy Selin fulfilled the responsibilities of the position until 2020 when the role was passed on to Acting Head Georgiy Tolkachov.
Halibarenko served as Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.K. from 2015 to 2020, when Zelensky removed her from her post and replaced her with Prystaiko.
Vacancies in Ukrainian diplomatic outposts are common – more than 10 of Ukraine’s embassies around the world have no ambassador and are instead led by interim representatives. The Embassy of Ukraine in Ethiopia hasn’t had an ambassador for a record 12 years.
Where some embassies haven’t had formal ambassadors for several years, such as Montenegro and Vietnam, others have relatively fresh vacancies that have not been filled in a timely manner. South Korea and Indonesia have remained without ambassadors since the last ones were removed from their posts in 2020.
In April 2021, Zelensky removed heads of six embassies as well as Mykola Tochytskyi, head of the Ukrainian Mission to the European Union who was also previously an ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg. The mass dismissal was explained by the Foreign Ministry as having been on the grounds of the ambassadors’ exceeded work terms.
The average term for an ambassador’s diplomatic mission to a country is approximately five years. The diplomatic services function under the principle of rotation, meaning that once an ambassador’s term comes to an end, they are rotated either back to the capital, or as an ambassador to a different country.
While Ukraine is not a part of NATO, it was granted a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner (EOP) status in June 2020, becoming the sixth country with such a status, along with Sweden, Finland, Australia, Jordan and Georgia.
In order to be granted EOP status, a country must meet a number of criteria, including participation of its forces in NATO operations and exercises, the rotation of NATO Response Forces, and individual and collective training activities conducted by Allied forces.
