Page 19 - UKRRptSept19

said he also told Putin there is no need to amend the Ukrainian Constitution to fulfill the Minsk Accords.
Parliamentary coalition to be divided into 15 groups of People’s Servant MPs. The People’s Servant parliamentary faction, which will form the parliamentary coalition and Cabinet of Ministers on its own, will be divided into 15 groups responsible for various spheres, the nv.ua news site reported on Aug. 5. Each group will be led by a deputy faction head, with the faction head likely to be 40-year-old IT entrepreneur David Arachamia.
Dmytro Razumkov, a 35-year-old political insider, told reporters on August 3 that he will be nominated by The People’s Servant party, loyal to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to serve as the new head of parliament (speaker). Razumkov was among Zelenskiy’s closest advisers during his upstart presidential campaign and was head of The People’s Servant during its parliamentary campaign. The son of one of Ukraine’s leading political scientists (Oleksandr Razumkov), Dmytro Razumkov had been a member of the Russian-oriented Party of Regions before spending 2010- 2014 working for Serhiy Tihipko, an oligarch who served as social policy minister between 2010 and 2012 for the Yanukovych administration (overthrown by the EuroMaidan). Tihipko served as deputy head of the Party of Regions between March 2012 and April 2014, when it collapsed following the EuroMaidan protests.
Candidates to lead parliamentary committees: the 41-year-old academic Danylo Hetmatsev as the likely head of the tax, customs and financial policy committee, the 40-year-old law professor Iryna Venediktova as the likely head of the judiciary committee, the 44-year-old entrepreneur Yuriy Aristov as the likely budget committee chair and the 35-year-old NGO expert Anastasia Krasnosilska as the likely anti-corruption committee head. The news site also identified the top candidate to chair the parliamentary fuel and energy committee as the 37-year-old Andriy Gerus, the former Concorde Capital executive director who currently serves as the president’s representative to the Cabinet of Ministers.
The former mayor of Warsaw will become Ukraine’s Business Ombudsman this fall. Marcin Svenczycki, currently a member of Poland’s parliament, earlier served as Poland’s minister of international economic relations. He will succeed Algirdas Sˇemeta, a Lithuanian economist who has held the job for almost five years.
2.5 Polls & Sociology
Ukrainian public optimism highest in eight years, survey says. About 35% of Ukrainians believe the country is moving in the right direction, the highest level in eight years, according to a poll conducted by the Rating Sociological Group between July 6 and 10 involving 2,000 respondents. About 39% of Ukrainians believe the country is moving in the wrong direction, close to the eight-year low reached in June 2019. The most optimistic segments are residents of the western regions, youth and supporters of President Zelensky,
19 UKRAINE Country Report September 2019 www.intellinews.com