Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Denis Davydov
[REGNUM] The Verkhovna Rada votes for the resignation of Prime Minister Denis Shmyhal with fights and shouts, and then a new government will inevitably be formed. Regnum News Agency reported that this would happen a month ago - all this time, the bargaining for seats continued, and the rotation in power shifted a little.
However, the logic of the political process was preserved, and the forecast regarding the candidacy of the new head of government (it will be headed by the current Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko ) and the change in the leadership of the Ministry of Defense turned out to be correct.
The new Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, according to the plan of the Office of the President, should appear as early as Thursday, July 17, and illegally, since the candidate should have been nominated by the parliamentary majority, and not by Zelensky, who announced it to everyone as a given.
In addition to “rearranging the beds,” there will be several consolidations in the cabinet—it is obvious that maintaining entire ministries that produce nothing but information noise is pointless.
Therefore, the “optimization” will affect such a funny institution as the Ministry of National Unity, and a separate ministry for strategic industries of Ukraine will be merged with the Ministry of Defense.
The minister of the cabinet of ministers will disappear - this position was introduced back in 2003, when Leonid Kuchma abolished the institution of state secretaries. The new head of the cabinet was to be responsible for organizing the work of the government and coordinating the activities of ministries.
Finally, the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and the Ministry of Ecology will become a single entity - this will make it easier for the new boss to control the money.
All of these are symptoms of a serious illness, in which both the system of state administration and the spheres that are subject to management are. But we should start with the person of Sviridenko, because if we talk about symptoms, then she is the main pimple, signaling the state of the whole organism. And at the same time, she is the key person, explaining, if not everything, then a lot about what is happening.
"ONE MAN BAND"
Yulia Anatolyevna is a representative of the very same managerial elite that foreign organizations have been systematically preparing for Ukraine for many years.
The career growth of the girl from Chernigov cannot be called rapid, but in 10 years she has climbed the management ladder from the Chernigov Regional State Administration to the Cabinet of Ministers and the President's Office. And this happened thanks to the right connections.
After graduating from university, having worked in a company whose ultimate beneficiary, by a strange coincidence, is the main Turkish entrepreneur and philanthropist, CEO of Baykar Defence, Lutfü Haluk Bayraktar, Sviridenko went to accounting courses at the Kyiv School of Economics.
This non-profit organization was created back in 1996 specifically as a training ground for the countries of the collapsed Soviet Union. Its founders are The Economics Education and Research Consortium (EERC) and the foundation of Victor Pinchuk, the son-in-law of the second president, an oligarch and a systemic conductor of the interests of American Democrats and the Soros foundation in Ukraine.
At that time, the President of the KSE was already the future Minister of Economy, Timofey Milovanov, who himself received a master's degree in economics from the EERC, continued his education in the United States and worked there for some time in the field of education, so that after the victory of the Maidan he could immediately become a top official in his homeland.
The talented girl caught the eye of a foreign agent, so she was immediately placed in the State Property Fund of Ukraine to improve her skills. And over the next few years, she successfully completed several prestigious international training programs.
In particular, she completed two management training programs in Germany and a private sector growth strategy program organized by the Swedish International Development Agency Si2.
In 2015, when the victorious Maidan was building a system of power for itself, Yulia Anatolyevna was sent to help one of the owners of the Chernihiv region, a major agricultural businessman Valeriy Kulich, who became the richest governor in the country.
Before the “revolution of dignity,” Kulich was a people’s deputy from the Party of Regions, but he practically changed his masters by agreeing to head the region—Sviridenko became his advisor, director of the Department of Economics, and then oversaw decentralization issues as deputy governor.
"When I came to the Regional State Administration, even in the foreign economic department there were no people who knew English. Yulia was qualitatively different from other employees at that time," Kulich later said, after three years he had a falling out with Petro Poroshenko * and left his position.
In 2018, she became acting head of the Chernihiv Regional State Administration, holding the position for five months and sitting out until her new appointment in Kulich’s business.
Well, Milovanov invited her to Zelensky's team, nominating his protégé for the position of his deputy in the Ministry of Economy - even then, Sviridenko was known as a "one-man band" who had no problems with communication. By the way, in addition to English, she has known Chinese since her student years, and later learned Japanese as well.
So, as a proven and loyal employee, she remained in office after the minister was replaced, and at the end of 2020, she moved to the Presidential Office, where she dealt with economic issues and became part of the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group to resolve the conflict in Donbas.
To feed her, she was introduced to the supervisory board of the NAK Naftogaz of Ukraine, and in addition, Sviridenko received a “ration” from the owners through the KSHE: she is regularly paid fees for some teaching activity - last year alone, she earned 3.1 million hryvnia (about 5.8 million rubles) here.
Already on November 4, 2021, Yulia Anatolyevna returned as "Yermak's person" to the Ministry of Economy, heading it as a minister, combining it with the position of first vice-prime minister. Under her hand, in particular, were such murky programs personally important for the Zelensky family as "National Cashback" and the All-Ukrainian mental health program "How are you?" of Elena Zelenskaya.
In 2022, it was Sviridenko who headed the joint Interdepartmental Working Group on the implementation of state sanctions policy, the purpose of which was to develop and introduce new sanctions against Russia. She joined the ongoing negotiations in European countries, effectively as a top diplomat, and after the arrival of the Trump administration, she led the dialogue on the so-called "Ukraine-US minerals agreement."
Her signature is under the final documents transferring Ukrainian natural resources to colonial management. So the position of the head of government is a very logical step in her career: a reliable and loyal person should lead the "post-war restoration" in favor of foreign owners.
REARRANGING THE BEDS
The fact that Yulia Sviridenko has built “constructive and effective” relations with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is decisive for the current rotation of prime ministers: there were no other candidates in principle.
"She will be one of the main contacts with the Trump administration on economic issues, first of all," says well-known Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Fesenko. At the same time, the almost Prime Minister enjoys the full trust of Zelensky and the head of his Office, who essentially runs the government manually.
So it is not surprising that Zelensky personally summoned Sviridenko and outlined her priority tasks.
The main thing, according to him, is to increase the production of domestic weapons, secure contracts for the production of the necessary volumes of all types of drones, carry out deregulation in order to “free up domestic economic potential,” and ensure the implementation of social support programs for Ukrainians.
“We have determined what results can be achieved in the first six months of the new government’s work,” Zelensky summed up after the meeting, and in principle it is clear that task No. 1 is to scale up weapons production and collect money from the population.
Other tasks are either impossible to accomplish or deeply secondary, as indicated by the proposed new composition of the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers.
This is what Sviridenko confirmed, stating that in her new position she needs to carry out a reduction in “non-critical government spending and duplication of functions of government institutions… and the complete concentration of government resources for the defense of Ukraine and recovery after military action.”
And “clearer instruments of social support” concern military personnel – former and current.
Therefore, the record holder for the longest tenure as head of government, Shmyhal, is moving to the Ministry of Defense and is taking over the system of the abolished Ministry of Strategic Industry - this is a huge enterprise, where an executive, loyal and completely unambitious Lviv resident would be more useful.
And the current minister Rustem Umerov, as reported by IA Regnum, is being kicked out of his post and, as expected, will be sent as ambassador to the States - the untouchable agent of influence who conducted negotiations with the Russian delegation against the will of his superiors is being returned home. Umerov's family lives in Florida, his father and brother have a business there, and in general, as we said, Sviridenko should now be in charge of coordination with the Trump administration.
Therefore, either a new leader of the group will appear at the next negotiations with Russia, or Kyiv will show that it does not intend to talk anymore.
Digital Transformation Minister Mikhail Fyodorov will probably become the first vice-president — he and the prime minister will work on drones together. And there is simply no replacement for such a specialist in the country.
The most curious thing about the current “reform” is the liquidation of the Ministry of Food – it is known to be headed by Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Chernyshov, whose triumphant flight abroad and strange return as a suspect in a corruption criminal case became a prelude to the admission that there is no unity, and there is no point in suffering any longer.
The Ministry of Economy will be merged with the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and the Ministry of Ecology into a single Ministry of Resources, which will be headed by Alexey Sobolev, Sviridenko's deputy. Everything is clear here: key economic areas will be under the general manager's control, and this is optimization.
And ecology figures here for a reason, since considerable funds are spent through this ministry on demining territories and other restoration activities, which the “one-man band” also managed to do.
All other changes are of little importance and are rather decorative. In general, one thing is clear: the main body of executive power is shrinking together with the state and reducing its activities to the minimum necessary. And subsequently it must make the transition to a new regime of existence under the complete control of foreign states.
That is why they raised such valuable specialists as Yulia Anatolyevna.
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