You're reading: Parliament appoints a new defense minister

 On July 3, Ukraine's parliament voted in the third defense minster in the past six months. The job was given to 46-year-old Valeriy Heletey, whose career was mostly built in the police force.

Heletey’s most famous and most
controversial job so far gas been chief of guard for former President
Viktor Yushchenko. The selection of a defense minister is a
prerogative of President Petro Poroshenko under the constitution. The
parliament approved his choice with 260 votes.

“I’m sure that
Ukraine will definitely win,” Heletey said in a very brief speech
in parliament after swearing allegiance to the Ukrainian people.
“And we will have military parade in Ukrainian Sevastopol.”

Heletey takes over
the ministry in a very challenging time. After Russia’s annexation of
Crimea, Ukraine is fighting a war with Russia-backed separatists in
the east, which exposed corruption and many other vulnerabilities in
the Ukrainian army.

The new minister’s
job will be fixing the army at the same time as fighting the war –
a task that many think he is ill-equipped to handle.

Born in Zakarpattia Oblast, Heletey was
a police colonel when in 2006 he headed the department that oversaw
law enforcement in the secretariat of President Yushchenko. He was
later appointed chief of state guard, which is in charge of security
of the nation’s top officials. He had infamously claimed in 2007 that
there was an attempt on Yushchenko’s life, but no proof was ever
found.

In 2009 Heletey lost this job, but was
re-appointed to the same job in March 2014 by acting President
Oleksandr Turchynov.

Poroshenko promised other appointments
on the same day. He said former Defense Minister Mykhailo Koval was
going to become deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense
Council.

He also said Viktor Muzhenko would be
appointed as chief of military command headquarters, calling him a
“person who showed himself as a hero during this anti-terrorist
operation.” Muzhenko, 52, headed the Ukrainian battalion of the
peacekeeping mission in Iraq.

In 2012 he was appointed deputy chief
of military command headquarters and in May 2014 he became as deputy
head of anti-terrorist operation, which Ukraine launched to fight the
armed separatists on the east.

Speaking in parliament, Poroshenko also
slammed corruption within army procurement. “We must clear the army
of those who are parasailing, pumping budget financing out of it,”
he said.

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