Ukrainian President, Volodimir Zelensky, announced on Sunday its intention to replace Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, one of the key figures in kyiv’s relationship with its foreign allies. His dismissal had been rumored for months before the corruption scandals that have affected his ministry, but he seems to have surprised the associates of Ukraine, as evidenced by the visit that Reznikov was to make this week to Washington to hold various meetings at the Pentagon. Zelensky has announced that he will be replaced by Rustem Umerov, who led the negotiations with Russia on the grain export agreement. The name change in Defense marks the biggest shakeup in the Ukrainian government since the Russian invasion began.
Reasons for dismissal
The Ukrainian presidency has not given many details about the dismissal of Reznikov, who had been at the defense front since the beginning of the war. “The ministry needs new approaches and other ways of interacting with the military and society in general,” Zelensky said Sunday when announcing his decision. However, he was well known that the 57 year old lawyer, who took office months before the outbreak of the war with little military background behind him, had long been in the pillory for corruption scandals in his department. The Ukrainian media came to publish in mid-February his imminent dismissal, but Zelensky ended up backing down due to the close personal relationships that Reznikov knew how to weave with the Defense headlines of the main Ukrainian allies.
That is perhaps the greatest of its merits. Getting the Europeans and Americans to break their taboos to supply kyiv with increasingly sophisticated weapons, from mobile missile launchers Himarsto the tanks leopard and very soon you hunt F-16. Another of the virtues attributed to him is not having meddled too much in the military management of the war, which has been left under the command of the generals, commanded by Valery Zaluzhny.
From the Ukraine it is also said that Reznikov himself had requested the relief, well received by the president to instill new energy in the department after 18 exhausting months of war.
Scandals have been uncovered by the press in recent months, many of them related to the contracting of equipment and services for the military. In one of the latest, unveiled last month, the ministry was accused of having bought Turkey “winter clothes & rdquor; for soldiers worth more €30 million, a clothes that in the end turned out to be summer. Before that, in January, it was discovered that the ministry had bought bulk eggs for the troop for more than double the price paid on average in Ukrainian supermarkets.
Reznikov was not currently under investigation, but the scandals prompted several dismissals and investigations in his department. Ukraine needs to show that it is willing to end the endemic corruption to advance in their process of accession to the European Uniona factor that adds to the growing intolerance on the part of its population to the goings-on in its institutions, given the sacrifices that the war has imposed on citizens.
Zelensky, who won the 2019 election by promising end corruptionrecently dismissed all military recruiterr before the bribery allegations that is attributed to them and has come to propose a law to punish with the crime of “treason & rdquor; episodes of corruption, taking advantage of the martial law that prevails in the country.
The Ukrainian president has proposed to Rustem Umerov to take the reins of Defense, a position that Parliament will have to ratify next week. Umerov was until now the director of the State Property Fundthe agency in charge of supervising the privatization of public companies. Its defenders argue that it has managed to bring transparency and rigor to a department traditionally known for its abuses and corruption.
Member of the tartar minoritypersecuted by the Russian occupation forces in the illegally annexed Crimea, Umerov has also led the negotiations with Moscow which led to grain export agreement across the Black Sea, suspended since Russia decided to break it unilaterally this summer. He is also credited with a prominent role in the negotiations for the prisoner exchanges.