Following are the Cabinet ministers approved by the Verkhovna Rada on April 14 session, with 239 national deputies voting in approval. (Brief profiles of the top ministers, prepared by Kyiv correspondent Zenon Zawada, appear first.)
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, 38, Poroshenko Bloc: His close relations to the president, cemented during his eight-year tenure as Vinnytsia mayor, enabled him to become appointed Verkhovna Rada chairman in November 2014. He served Mr. Poroshenko loyally, directly fulfilling his will in Parliament. The tight relationship was established through Mr. Groysman ’s father, who became acquainted with Mr. Poroshenko when he was looking to support a candidate in 2006 for mayor of Vinnytsia, where one of his biggest confectionary factories is located, the expres.ua news site reported. Mr. Groysman was 28 when he was elected. Critics accused Mr. Groysman of repeatedly and grossly violating parliamentary rules throughout his tenure, as well as sabotaging reforms legislation.
First Vice Prime Minister, Economic Development and Trade Minister Stepan Kubiv, 54, Poroshenko Bloc: The Ternopil oblast native served as head of the National Bank of Ukraine immediately following the Euro-Maidan. After his four-month tenure, during which the hryvnia plummeted 25 percent in value, Mr. Kubiv was widely accused of haphazard bank refinancing policies and even profiting off the depreciation himself. Although prosecutorial investigators arrested and questioned him, he was never charged with a criminal offense. Afterwards he served as the president’s representative to the Verkhovna Rada. He currently serves as head of the Vasyl Stus Memorial Charity Association.
Vice Prime Minister for Euro-Integration and Euro-Atlantic Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze, 43, Poroshenko Bloc: Having extensive foreign policy experience, she served as the first deputy head of the Rada’s Foreign Affairs Committee, member of the Ukraine-NATO Interparliamentary Council, and head of the Ukrainian delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. She studied at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in the summer of 1992 and she studied international relations and international law at Montana State University in 1993-1994. She served as director of Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s Open Ukraine Foundation in 2009-2011 and as director of the Yalta European Strategy, founded by Victor Pinchuk, in 2011-2014.
Vice Prime Minister for Regional Development Hennadii Zubko, 48: Part of the president’s team since the start, he’s been a behind-the-scenes player, rarely appearing in public or making statements. He played an active role in leading the investigations and legal procedures related to the deadly attack by Russian-backed forces on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over the Donbas region that killed its 283 passengers and 15 crew members. He was also involved in forming the State Agency to Renew the Donbas.
Vice Prime Minister Volodymyr Kistion, 50: A native of the Vinnytsia Oblast, he served as the deputy mayor to Mr. Groysman in 2008-2011 and then as first deputy head in 2011-2014. Since October 2014, he had been the first deputy to Mr. Zubko, who has served as the minister for regional development, construction, utilities and maintenance.
Vice Prime Minister Pavlo Rozenko, 45: As social policy minister, he proved himself an effective bureaucrat, most notably for managing the difficult task of distributing subsidies offered by the government after it fulfilled IMF requirements to raise natural gas prices to market levels. More than 5 million Ukrainian households qualified to reduce the cost of heating their homes and ovens because they were unaffordable. Despite the standard bureaucratic confusion, most Ukrainians didn’t feel the shock of surging gas prices amid currency depreciation throughout the winter. He also managed to keep pension payments flowing to the elderly residents of the occupied Donbas and reacted swiftly to corruption scandals, for example dismissing the entire Employment Service staff when its head was caught taking a bribe. Chornobyl clean-up veterans claimed Mr. Rozenko failed to protect their social payments from being reduced.
Vice Prime Minister Viacheslav Kyrylenko, 47: He retained his post despite being widely disliked by Ukraine’s arts and culture community for what they consider to be his Soviet-style, outdated approach to culture, often characterized as “sharovarshchyna,” or stereotypical portrayals and handling of cultural life in Ukraine. Anonymous artists and intellectuals under the Cultural Alliance label in November 2015 distributed an open letter to the president and the prime minister calling for Mr. Kyrylenko’s dismissal, citing his inability to communicate with the arts and culture community, failure to organize ways to present Ukraine culturally to the world, lacking a vision for Ukraine’s arts and cultural development, among numerous other criticisms (including his inability to speak English). Instead, Mr. Kyrylenko’s initiatives centered on banning anti-Ukrainian books from Russia, setting requirements for Ukrainian-language pop songs on the radio and removing billboards and light box ads from the city center.
The other members of the Cabinet include ministers with the following portfolios:
Defense – Stepan Poltorak
Foreign Affairs – Pavlo Klimkin
Internal Affairs – Arsen Avakov
Finance – Oleksandr Danyliuk
Justice – Pavlo Petrenko
Social Policy – Andrii Reva
Ecology and National Resources – Ostap Semerak
Agrarian Policy – Taras Kutovyi
Education – Lilia Hrynevych
Youth and Sports – Ihor Zhdanov
Temporarily Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons – Vadym Chernysh
Energy and Coal Production – Ihor Nosalyk
Infrastructure – Volodymyr Omelian
Culture – Yevhen Nyshchuk
Information Policy – Yurii Stets
Health – to be determined