The president defers major reshuffling of oblast governors

Photo: Reuters

President Petro Poroshenko has plans to re-appoint this week the majority of heads of oblast state administrations (OSA). As Capital learned, there will be no more than 3-5 new figures, while a more large-scale staff shuffling may happen in a few months.

Governors will return to the Verkhovna Rada

A source of Capital said the dismissal of heads of OSA was submitted by the Cabinet of Ministers in compliance with the law and has already made it to the president’s office. Despite this, the president decided to leave most of the current 24 heads in their posts. «Appointments will be made this week. There will be no more than three to five new governors and the process of reappointment will last for a longer period of time. This is due to the fact that the Presidential Administration is cautiously reviewing the work of governors and the results of the work of OSA. Several oblasts have been reviewed and decisions have been made as to who will retain their position and who will be replaced. For this very reason the process is quite slow», — Capital was told.
He added that among those that will be replaced is Head of the Kharkiv Oblast State Administration Ihor Baluta. Prior to his appointment by the acting president Oleksandr Turchynov to this position Baluta was a deputy of the Kharkiv Oblast Council of the Batkivshchyna party. He is considered to be close to Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov. «The Kharkiv governor will definitely be replaced and Ihor Kolomoiskiy will retain his position», — the source noted.

It is also expected that the head of the Donetsk OSA Serhiy Taruta will not be reappointed. According to information that Capital possesses, the Party of Regions insisted on Taruta’s resignation and proposed to appoint for this post the mayor of Donetsk Oleksandr Lukyanchenko. The latter confirmed to journalists that he was offered the position to head the oblast state administration. «I am the mayor of the city and for this reason I turned down this offer», — Lukyanchenko said at a press conference.

MP Anatoliy Blyznyuk (Party of Regions) told Capital that he also was offered by the Presidential Administration to head the Donetsk oblast. «I put forth my conditions, but I am ready as a patriot of the region and the country», — said Blyznyuk.

A source of Capital in the Batkivshchyna faction in the parliament said that the president also reviewed the candidacy of former Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine Stepan Kubiv for the position of head of the Lviv OSA instead of MP Iryna Sekh (Svoboda party), who submitted her resignation. MP Yuriy Syrotyuk (Svoboda party) told Capital that the party will not insist on retaining for itself the position of head of the Lviv OSA.

It is worth noting that besides Sekh also Head of the Zakarpattya OSA Valeriy Lunchenko, Head of the Luhansk OSA Yuriy Odarchenko and Head of the Sumy OSA Volodymyr Shulha have been combining their duties in the parliament and oblast administrations. All of them are members of the Batkivshchyna faction.

Tied by the coalition

A source of Capital in the PA says the majority of heads of OSA have held on to their positions while the PA continues to review their activity. But there is another version according to which there is no major reshuffling of the heads of OSA due to the fact that the majority of them were appointed based on the quota principle, meaning that the posts were divvied up among members of the parliamentary coalition. «Here the president must make a firm decision. Perhaps further appointments will be made based on whether the president is working inside the coalition or within the framework of spontaneous resolution of issues in the Verkhovna Rada using different methods that he could exploit. If this is within the confines of the coalition, then the president will be forced to consider the previous appointments and how they were divided based according to the coalition principle in Batkivshchyna, UDAR and Svoboda.» Vice Chair of the Batkivshchyna faction Dmytro Shlem told Capital.

Svoboda sticks to this point of view. «For the sake of maintaining solid partner relations with the coalition the president would be well advised to agree with the parliamentary majority on the decision regarding replacement of governors», — says Syrotyuk.

As a reminder, by agreeing the appointments to oblast state administrations, members of the UDAR party were appointed heads of the Chernivtsi, Khmelnytskiy, Cherkasy, Zaporizhzhia and Kyiv OSA and members of the Svoboda party were appointed in six oblasts — Zhytomyr, Kirovohrad, Lviv, Poltava, Ternopil and Rivne. The majority of the posts were taken up by members of the Batkivshchyna party. Shlemko underscored that if Poroshenko decides to not consider the acting coalition, he will fail to single-handedly replace the heads of OSA at his own discretion one way or another. After all, pursuant to Article 118 of the Constitution the chairs of local state administrations are appointed to their position and are dismissed from their duties by the president according to the submission of the Cabinet of Ministers.