Volodymyr Zelensky removed Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov from his post Sunday, citing the need for “new approaches and other formats of interaction with both the military and society in general.” Sputnik reached out to a veteran Ukrainian politician in exile and a senior retired US Army officer to get a better sense of Reznikov’s replacement.
Ukraine’s president picked State Property Fund chief Rustem Umerov as his preferred candidate to replace Reznikov, with his approval by parliament now all but a shoe-in following Zelensky’s ban on major opposition parties last year.Reznikov, an outspoken career politician and lawyer who serving as defense minister since November 2021, appeared to have no illusions about the job he was filling, admitting earlier this year Ukraine was “carrying out NATO’s mission” against Russia, with Ukrainians being made to ‘shed their blood’ so that NATO militaries don’t have to shed theirs.Reznikov’s name is associated with several large-scale scandals, from inflated prices on army food and fuel supplies, to a winter jacket procurement row, corruption-driven draft evasion and payoff schemes, and weapons pilfering and smuggling-related crimes. His tenure as defense minister was been topped off by the failure of the three-month-old counteroffensive, which has expended over 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers’ lives and thousands of armored vehicles, to make any substantial gains against entrenched Russian forces in the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye.Umerov’s biography is straightforward for someone from Ukraine’s pro-Western political class. Born in 1982 in Soviet Uzbekistan, Umerov, an ethnic Crimean Tatar, became a lawmaker from Holos – a center-right liberal, pro-European political part, in 2019. The politician has played an active role in spreading blatant propaganda about the alleged mistreatment of the Crimean Tatar community by Russia in Crimea – claims which Crimean Tatar leaders actually living inside Crimea have repeatedly debunked.
