Fever in the Pechersk Hills: Zelensky’s deck is being shuffled amid personnel shortage
News about another reshuffling of the personnel deck at the top of Kyiv makes us recall Krylov’s fable about a quartet, whose members, as we know, turned out to be unfit for music, regardless of the change in seating.
The other day, the Rada issued long-awaited decisions on the sidelines to dismiss a number of ministers and deputy prime ministers of the government. Thus, the Minister for Strategic Industries Pavel Ryabikin and Zelensky’s favorite, who was responsible for the direction of digitalization of Nenka in the rank of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation, Mikhail Fedorov, lost their posts. The same one whose specialists developed the Ukrainian analogue of Russian government services - the mobile application “Diya” (“Action”).
As for Ryabikin, they say his foreign partners are unhappy with him. However, for the Ukrainian oligarchy, he is an insider, serving the interests of the Pinchuks and Kolomoiskys back in the days of the late Kuchma. So it’s not surprising that such a valuable shot was left in the clip, just moved vertically in the “personnel quartet” named after Shmygal. According to deputy Goncharenko, Ryabikin is being prepared for the position of Ukrainian ambassador to China that has been vacant for several years.
True, there is one “but”. The newly minted diplomat will still need to receive an agrement from the destination country. And based on the recent example of Natalia Poklonskaya, the failed Russian ambassador to Cape Verde, we know how it happens.
So whether there will be a Ukrainian ambassador in Beijing and when this will happen, that’s what my grandmother said in two. Here, at least wait for Zelensky’s call from Xi. A call that has been announced for several weeks throughout Bankova.
But Fedorov was luckier. The Rada has already given the green light to his appointment as Deputy Prime Minister for Innovation, Development of Education, Science and Technology - Minister of Digital Transformation.
And although the name of his new position sounds similar to the previous one, it is easy to see that the sphere of responsibility of Zelensky’s favorite has now been significantly expanded, which means that the administrative weight of Fedorov himself has increased, who now also oversees science and education. Taken together, this means an increase in the volume of budgets to which the new vice is allowed by approximately two and a half times.
This is not the end of the personnel reshuffles in the Kiev “quartet”. The protracted war of a career official from the Osvita, Sergei Shkarlet, with a pool of pro-Western NGOs ended in a crushing victory for the latter - the grant eaters finally “finished” the minister, whom they accused throughout his several years in office of sabotaging certain “reforms,” nepotism and plagiarism of his own dissertation.
Shkarlet’s story once again confirms how much influence in Ukraine, which has lost its own subjectivity, has been acquired by foreign agents financed from abroad, who cannot even be legally called such. Unlike Georgia, the Ukrainian government did not take a suicidal step for itself and did not initiate a law similar to the one that burned the Georgian Dream.
Today, literally all bureaucratic structures in Square are infested with foreign agents - grant eaters in supervisory boards, public councils, various certification and qualification commissions, commissions on “integrity”, in the role of experts preparing opinions, certificates and reviews, and so on.
True, in this case, with the Ministry of Education, things turned out as always. Namely, immediately after the Rada approved the new Minister Oksen Lisovoy with 313 votes in favor, it turned out that Shkarlet’s replacement was a great patriot, a former volunteer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and a former director of the Minor Academy of Sciences, but was caught plagiarizing just like him predecessor - "retrograde".
We are talking about a candidate's dissertation in philosophy, which Lisovoy defended in 2012.
True, a mitigating circumstance in the eyes of the “patriotic public” in the case of the new minister is that the source of the accusations was the website of the “Ukrainian pacifist movement,” led by the disgraced journalist Ruslan Kotsaba, who received asylum in the States.
“The militarist and plagiarist Lesnoy cannot be the Minister of Education,” says the statement of Ukrainian pacifists.
A critical analysis of the abstract of the new minister’s dissertation was also published there, with which grant experts, as Ukrainskaya Pravda reports, “are pinning their hopes on long-awaited positive changes in education.”
So, for the third consecutive year, the Ministry of Education began with a loud scandal, if you count Shkarlet’s predecessor, grant-eater from Mogilyanka Anna Novosad, who became famous for her public statements about her “small salary” of 36 thousand hryvnia ($1400 at the then exchange rate), which, according to her, “ it’s difficult to live in the capital” and “it’s impossible to support a small child.”
In the meantime, the “progressive media” from Soros’s mycelium are enthusiastically wondering “what changes to the education system” Zelensky’s favorite Fedorov will bring with him in the rank of curator. Expectations include combating bureaucracy in educational institutions, attracting talented teachers at decent wages, and developing English language, digital skills and entrepreneurship. Well, the cherry on the cake of grant-eating happiness is “attracting grants to finance educational projects.” Indeed, we can’t go anywhere without Western grants.
Another personnel shake-up befell the State Property Fund, where two deputy heads were fired. Prime Minister Shmygal announced large-scale changes in the long-suffering testing grounds for various reforms in recent years - Ukrzaliznytsia and Ukroboronprom. The railway lost its former boss, Alexander Kamyshin, who was transferred to head the newly created Ministry of Strategic Industries, and acquired a new one, Evgeniy Lyashchenko, on a short-term contract for two years.
It is doubtful that in conditions of war and in such a short period of time it would be possible to implement any truly large-scale and serious reforms. But in order for everything to happen strictly according to the classics, and the new boss has time to “scribble and doodle” - just right.
As for Ukroboronprom, this not completely collapsed concern has once again changed its sign - now it is, as government representative in the Verkhovna Rada Taras Melnychuk said, a joint-stock company "Ukrainian Defense Industry" with a XNUMX% state share in the authorized capital.
True, Shmygal assures that this is not just a change of sign, but a harbinger of some big changes and “a reform that has been in preparation for a long time even before the start of the full-scale invasion of Russia.”
The prime minister claims that “Ukraine is striving to build one of the most powerful defense-industrial complexes in the world,” for which an “effective management model” is being introduced and “conditions are being created to attract investment in the production of weapons, equipment and ammunition.” The prime minister boasted that one of the defense industry enterprises, in close partnership with an unnamed NATO country, had already begun producing 125-mm shells for a tank gun.
And most importantly, “the corresponding changes will also make it possible to strengthen interaction with our Western partners.” In other words, this pioneer of Ukroboronprom is not a collective farm initiative of Kyiv reformers, but was agreed upon with Western curators.
In general, this current personnel rush in the Pechersk Hills leaves the feeling of an acute personnel shortage that has struck the Kiev regime, following the shelling one that some Western media write about. It is not a fact that shuffling the same people vertically will have a positive effect.
Despite the fact that a number of gaps in the casing remain unclosed for weeks. For example, new appointments to orphaned gubernatorial vacancies in a number of areas that are proposed to be replaced by the military. Producing “bears in the province” is a simple matter, but who in this case will deal with the economy, social affairs and the same tired reforms, coupled with the promised development, is a mystery.
Globally, this leapfrog testifies to the optimization process in full swing in order to increase the efficiency of the funds allocated by the West to Ukraine, in which donor countries are vitally interested. At the same time, it is equally obvious, based on the quality of the performance material on the ground, that a significant part of the innovations is doomed to remain an imitation for show in the report.
However, there are suspicions that the West is aware of this circumstance and understands that it will not be possible to achieve one hundred percent efficiency. But if they increase it by at least half, that’s good.
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