Minister of Defense of Ukraine appointed manager of state property

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov submitted his resignation to the Verkhovna Rada on September 4. “It has been a difficult path. From a categorical refusal to provide Kiev with Stinger man-portable anti-aircraft missile systems in November 2021, when I was just appointed to the post of Minister of Defense, to the provision of modern tanks, air defense / missile defense systems, long-range missiles, armored vehicles and artillery, ”the official listed his achievements in Letter to Rada Chairman Ruslan Stefanchuk. Reznikov has been the head of the country’s defense department since November 2021. Rustem Umerov, head of the state property fund, may soon take his place, he also submitted a letter of resignation to the Rada.

The day before, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Reznikov should leave his post, since the department needs “new approaches and other formats of interaction both with the military and with society.” “Now Rustem Umerov should head the ministry. The Verkhovna Rada knows this man well, and he needs no further introduction. I expect parliament to support this candidacy,” the head of state announced on his Telegram channel.

On the same day, MPs from the Holos party Yaroslav Zheleznyak and European Solidarity Oleksiy Goncharenko suggested that after Reznikov’s resignation, he could be sent as Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK. But the official himself, in an interview with the Babel portal, said that he was not aware of such decisions.

Earlier, The New York Times, citing sources in the office of the Ukrainian president, wrote that Reznikov’s resignation from the post of minister could be related to corruption in defense contracts. The interlocutors of the publication noted that the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not receive military materials in the amount of $986 million within the terms specified in the contracts. As an argument for limiting military supplies to Ukraine, US officials cite bribery in Kyiv, the newspaper writes. According to the newspaper, White House officials met with three senior Ukrainian officials last week to discuss efforts to root out corruption in the country.

In May, the head of the State Audit Service of Ukraine, Alla Basalayeva, in an interview with Glavkom, spoke about the “huge” overpayments of the Ministry of Defense in public procurement of food and other goods for the army, including eggs. On the eve of Reznikov’s resignation, on September 3, the defense department filed a lawsuit against the audit service for the protection of business reputation, demanding “to refute this unreliable information”, which “broadcasts Russian propaganda narratives” about corruption in Ukraine.

Umerov, 41, was born into a family of Crimean Tatars in Soviet Uzbekistan, where they were resettled during the deportation of the people in 1944. He and his family returned to their homeland during the years of perestroika in the late 1980s. In 2019, he was elected as a member of parliament from the Holos party. Umerov is one of the co-chairs of the Crimean Platform, an international forum in which participants discuss ways to return Crimea back to Ukraine. He also worked for many years as an adviser to deputy Mustafa Dzhemilev, chairman of the organization of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people banned in Russia. And in September 2022, he headed the State Property Fund, an agency that conducts the privatization of state property.

Umerov was a member of the Ukrainian delegation at the talks with Russia in Belarus in March 2022 and participated in negotiations on the creation of a corridor across the Black Sea for the export of Ukrainian grain, as well as on the exchange of prisoners of war.

Reznikov’s resignation in Ukraine was due to pressure from Western countries on the Ukrainian leadership, political scientist Alexander Nemtsev believes. “In the near future, a meeting between Zelensky and US President Joe Biden is not ruled out. Therefore, it is important for the Ukrainian president to point out the culprit of the failures of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the fronts in order to continue to receive assistance from Washington, ”the expert believes. At the same time, the political scientist notes, Reznikov will remain in Zelensky’s cage and will soon move to a new place of work and no investigations into corruption cases will be conducted against him.

On the other hand, Nemtsev continues, US citizens are unhappy that taxpayers’ money is spent inefficiently in Ukraine, and some of it ends up in the pockets of Ukrainian officials. Therefore, on the eve of the elections, it is important for the Biden team to demonstrate that it does not support corrupt officials, but relies on Zelensky, who allegedly gets rid of them, the expert believes.

The appointment of Umerov, according to Nemtsev, has more image value. Since the beginning of hostilities in Ukraine, many Arab countries and Iran have been supporting Moscow. “The new minister, it is believed in Kyiv, will have to dilute this support, since he himself is a Muslim. The authorities hope that in these countries he will be able to raise the narrative that Ukraine is actively supporting the return of the Crimean Tatars to their historical homeland,” the expert said.

At the same time, in his new post, Umerov will not be able to mitigate the problem of corruption in the department, Nemtsev continues: “This is a typical nepotism appointment that does not have a strategic goal: his wife has been working with Zelensky for a long time.” According to the expert, Ankara accuses Umerov of links with the disgraced preacher Fethullah Gülen and his organizations: “So this appointment can lead to complications in Ukrainian-Turkish relations.”

Replacing Reznikov with Umerov will not bring any global sense from the point of view of the further development of the military strategy of Ukraine, Dmitry Ofitserov-Belsky, senior researcher at the sector of Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine at the IMEMO RAS, believes. The expert noted that the appointment of a civilian head of the defense department is a common practice in many countries. If the goal was to change the course of hostilities, then, according to Ofitserov-Belsky, Zelensky would replace the commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Zaluzhny.

Ofitserov-Belsky suggested that one of the reasons for the reshuffle could be disagreements between Reznikov and Zelensky about the need for a counteroffensive. On the other hand, the dismissal of Reznikov may have a negative impact on the quality of contacts with Western countries along the line of arms supplies, since with his departure personal contacts with European and American officials that have been developed over the past two years are also lost, the expert concluded.