Twelve days after taking the job, Rustem Umerov sacked half his own ministry. On Sept. 18, 2023, the government dismissed six deputy defense ministers and the state secretary for defense. Ukrainska Pravda, citing unnamed government sources, reported that all of them had resigned at the new minister’s request. Umerov posted one word on Facebook to explain: “Rebooting.” He added: “We started. We continue. The Ministry continues to work as usual.”
The dismissed deputies were Hanna Maliar, Volodymyr Havrylov, Rostyslav Zamlynskyi, Denys Sharapov, Andrii Shevchenko and Vitalii Deineha. Kostiantyn Vashchenko lost the state secretary post. Replacements had not been named, though consultations on candidates were under way.
Why Reznikov went
Umerov became defense minister on Sept. 6, after President Volodymyr Zelensky asked parliament to remove Oleksii Reznikov. Reznikov’s tenure had been marred by scandals over the purchase of equipment and supplies for soldiers. DW listed bribes accepted at regional muster offices so that men could avoid mobilization, and uniforms allegedly bought at inflated prices. An earlier round of criticism, at the start of the year, had focused on overpriced food.
Zelensky said on Sept. 3 that the ministry needed “new approaches and other formats of interaction both with the military and with society as a whole.” He listed what he wanted from the new chief: a stronger central role for the ministry, protection for soldiers, wider international partnerships, a curb on corruption, faster innovation and a military reformed to NATO standards. “I am sure that Rustem Umerov is able to provide it,” he said on Sept. 7.
The man himself
Umerov, 41 when he was nominated, is the first Crimean Tatar to lead Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. He was born in 1982 in Soviet Uzbekistan, where his family lived after Stalin’s 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars. They returned to Ukraine only in the 1990s. In an interview with the newspaper Liwyj bereh, he said that history left him with “an existential opposition to Russia’s colonial and predatory policies.”
After studying economics he went into business, including a stint as a department head at a Turkish mobile phone company in Ukraine, and worked as an adviser to the Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev. In 2019 he won a seat in parliament for the Holos party. There he chaired a committee that oversees how Western military aid is handled, and pushed for greater transparency.
Before the ministry he spent about a year running the State Trust Foundation, which handles privatization. DW reported that his office sold a subsidiary of the arms maker Ukroboronprom, which processes production residues, for 211 million euros.
His diplomatic record was part of the appeal. Umerov sat in the Ukrainian delegation at the first round of talks with Moscow in Belarus right after the invasion, and he took part in the 2022 grain deal negotiations in Turkey. He also has contacts in Turkey and the Islamic world and in the United States, where a foundation he set up helped start a programme for aspiring Ukrainian politicians at Stanford.
Sources
- Who is Ukraine's designated defense minister, Rustem Umerov?
- Ukraine war latest: Defense Ministry 'reboot' underway as government dismisses six deputy ministers
