Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has appointed Oleksiy Danilov as the new secretary of the country’s National Security and Defense Council, the presidential website reported on Oct. 3.
The appointment was made just days after Zelensky on Sept. 30 accepted resignation of the previous secretary Oleksandr Danylyuk who had quit the office citing his “uneasy relationship” with Andriy Bohdan, the head of the Presidential Office.
Besides, in an Oct. 1 interview with BBC, Danylyuk also said that a possible revocation of nationalization of the PrivatBank, the country’s biggest commercial bank previously co-owned by oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy, who is closely related to Bohdan.
The new secretary Danilov, 57, is known to have been a mayor of Luhansk in 1994-1997, being the youngest official on this post in the city’s history, and then a Luhansk Oblast governor briefly in 2005.
He also ran a business and lectured at the East Ukrainian Volodymyr Dahl National University in Luhansk.
In 2006, Danilov got elected as a member of parliament with the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc fraction.
On July 23, 2019, Zelensky also appointed his as Danylyuk’s deputy for economic and cybernetic security.
