Cabinet Replacements Driven By Lack of Results – Servant of the People MP

On March 4, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration in Ukraine unveiled wide-ranging changes to nearly every single ministry in the government, with the majority of ministers, including the prime minister, replaced with fresh faces. One of the main questions about these changes is about their necessity – many commentators, including Oleh Rybachuk, a chief of staff for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, believed that replacing now ex-prime minister Oleksiy Honcharuk would be "political suicide." 

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But Vadym Halaychuk, an MP for Zelensky’s ruling Servant of the People Party, has a different perspective. Speaking on Hromadske’s Weekly Wrap-Up, he said that while he was “sorry to see the previous Cabinet of Ministers go,” he added that “...at some point in time, it became apparent that it was not getting the results that people had expected, and it became difficult to communicate what it is that went wrong.”

From left to right: Servant of the People MP Vadym Halaychuk, ex-chief of staff to President Viktor Yushchenko and head of CentreUA think-tank Oleh Rybachuk, and Hromadske journalist Kari Odermann. Photo: hromadske

But he noted that issues like budget underperformance and government mismanagement of the pace of reform raised red flags in the party. “We realized that things were not managed properly on the government’s behalf in very very sensitive issues...budgets, pensions, payments to the miners...things that are very very sensitive. And then all of a sudden, the news comes out that the ministers, the deputy ministers, got themselves pretty hefty salary bonuses by the end of the year. And that was not a very good decision politically,” he said.

And disappointing results were not the only reason the party said it decided to make changes – Halaychuk also brought up Honcharuk’s resignation letter, following a leaked tape scandal where Honcharuk was heard making disparaging comments about Zelenskyy’s economic acumen – but Zelenskyy then granted Honcharuk an extension, laying out specific performance indicators Honcharuk was expected to hit.

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“The moment the news broke out that the former prime minister submitted his resignation papers to the president, not the parliament, that became apparent that that government was not going to last long,” pointed out the Servant of the People MP.

/Text by Romeo Kokriatski, interview by Kari Odermann