You're reading: Jaresko confirms she is ready to become Ukraine’s prime minister

Ukraine's Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko confirmed on March 22 that she wants to head a technocratic government as prime minister.

Ukrainian media reported that President Petro Poroshenko had offered to nominate Jaresko as the replacement choice for the deeply unpopular Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

But she was silent about the matter until confirming it today in a statement published on Facebook, which quickly got picked up by news media international and garnered more than 1,000 shares and more than 3,000 likes for one of her favored methods of communicating with the public.

“I’m ready to form a team that right now will start working for Ukraine and its citizens, not for certain business or political groups,” Jaresko wrote.

But it may be a case of too little, too late politically.

The statement comes the day after several major Ukrainian media quoted their sources as saying that the parliament coalition members have privately agreed on another candidate for the post – Volodymyr Groysman, speaker of the parliament and an ally of Poroshenko.

Groysman as prime minister, however, would be seen as a business-as-usual choice that would do nothing to advance the reformist and anti-corruption fight in the nation, especially if Poroshenko’s handpicked general prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, remains on the job.

Jaresko has big support among younger, politically independent and pro-Western lawmakers.

“My vote is for her,” lawmaker and member of the Petro Poroshenko bloc Mustafa Nayyem wrote on Facebook, reacting to Jaresko’s statement.

Still, Jaresko doesn’t have the 226 votes that she needs to win the prime minister seat.

A Ukrainian-American living in Kyiv since the 1990s, Jaresko joined Ukrainian government in 2014. She came from the private sector and has no political background.

She doesn’t want a political future, either.

“I never wanted high posts and I have no plans or desire to pursue a political career in future,” she wrote on March 22.

Jaresko’s unwillingness to get involved in politics threatens her chances to win the prime minister seat.

The fact that she doesn’t want any ministers coming from politics in her Cabinet doesn’t make her an attractive candidate for the factions who are willing to support a prime minister candidate in exchange for seats on the government.

“It just does not seem that there are votes for such government, and even if so, they only would be allowed to serve with a date set for the next elections,” deputy head of Odessa Oblast Governor Sasha Borovik wrote under Jaresko’s post.