Zelensky dismissed the Minister of Defense and appointing a Tatar ethnic telecommunication businessman instead
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that he will ask the parliament this week to choose Rustam Umarov to fill the position of defense minister, after his decision to dismiss the current defense minister Oleksiy Reznikov from his post.
This is the biggest change in the Ukrainian army during the war waged by Russia since February 2022.
Zelensky said, “I decided to change the Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov spent more than 550 days in total war”.
He added, “I think the ministry needs new methods and other forms of interaction with both the army and society as a whole”.
The Ukrainian parliament must approve the change of defense minister, but the decision is likely to have the support of a majority of lawmakers in the Verkhovna Rada.
Zelensky said he expected parliament to approve the appointment of Rustam Umarov as defense minister.
Rustam Umarov is a prominent member of the Crimean Tatar community who has represented his country in the delicate negotiations with Russia.
Born in Soviet Uzbekistan, the country to which his family was exiled under Stalin, then he returned to Crimea as a child when Tatars were allowed back in the 80s.
Rustam Umarov, 41, started his career in telecom in 2004 and was elected to Parliament in 2019.
There he served as co-chair of the Crimea Platform; an international diplomatic effort aimed at reversing Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014.
He worked for years as an advisor to the historical leader of the Crimean Tatars, Mustafa Jamiliev.
Russia wrested control of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and held a referendum on the annexation, which Ukraine condemned as illegitimate.
After the annexation and after the full-scale Russian invasion began, Umarov participated in behind-the-scenes talks with Russian officials, including negotiating the exchange of high-profile prisoners, and the evacuation of civilians.
He was part of the Ukrainian delegation to negotiations with Russia in the first weeks of the war and participated in talks on establishing a corridor for the export of Ukrainian grain across the Black Sea.
In September last year he was appointed head of the State Property Fund, a particularly difficult role in Ukraine, where the privatization process has been tainted by corruption.
In turn, and despite the many dealings between the sacked Ukrainian defense minister Oleksiy Reznikov and his US counterpart Lloyd Austin, a spokesman for the US Department of Defense declined to comment on the dismissal of the Ukrainian Defense Minister, saying that it was an internal matter of the Ukrainian government.
