Who is Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s new defence minister? The experienced politician is paving the way for Crimean Tatars, but inherits a ministry plagued by scandal
Kristina Berdynskykh 2 October 2023
When offered the job of Ukraine’s defence minister by Volodymyr Zelenskyi, Rustem Umerov told the president he would first need to consult his people.
By people he meant the Mejilis, the representative body of Crimean Tatars, who are now in exile after the Russian occupation of the peninsula.
If he accepted the job, Umerov would occupy the highest position held by a Crimean Tatar in 240 years.
“Zelenskyi showed tact and said: ‘Okay, consult’,” says Mustafa Dzhemilev, a Crimean Tatar leader, who is sitting in an apartment in a modern housing complex in Kyiv. It was here that Umerov, an experienced politician, public servant and businessman, came for advice.
Dzhemilev told Umerov he had his trust, but added: “If you discredit yourself in any way, you discredit not only yourself, but also our entire people.” He took the job.
Umerov inherits a host of challenges. The previous defence minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, resigned amid a series of corruption scandals over procurement at Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense.
So putting the department’s procurement system in order, fighting internal corruption and reforming its administrative apparatus will be his main tasks, according to Vitaly Shabunin, head of the board at the Anti-Corruption Center NGO.
“The Ministry of Defense is a state within a state. Even without a war, any changes in it are a big challenge,” Shabunin tells openDemocracy.
After the scandals during Reznikov’s tenure, Shabunin said Umerov’s appointment has made him feel “calmer” about the fate of the ministry, which powers the country’s resistance against Russia’s ongoing invasion.
Here’s what you need to know about Ukraine’s new defence minister.
Who is Rustem Umerov? Rustem Umerov was born in Uzbekistan. As part of Stalin’s wartime deportations of minorities, the Soviet authorities deported his family, alongside thousands of Crimean Tatars, from Crimea to Central Asia in 1944. They were able to return to the peninsula only in the early 1990s. There, Umerov attended a boarding school for gifted children and was a fellow of the US State Department’s American Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) programme.
After graduating with a degree in finance, he worked for a major Ukrainian telecoms company, Lifecell, for seven years. He also became an assistant to Mustafa Dzhemilev, a legendary Soviet-era dissident and former political prisoner, and was a delegate to the Kurultai, the national assembly of the Crimean Tatar people. Umerov comes from a respected religious family in Crimea who sponsored the restoration of a prominent mosque building in Bakhchisaray, Crimea, Dzhemilev said.
From 2010 to 2013, Umerov worked as a managing director in several Ukrainian investment companies (IGG Investments and iCapital), and in 2013, together with his brother, he founded his own investment company, Astem, which manages investments in communications, information technology and infrastructure. He is also one of the founders of the Crimean International Business Association.
But Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 forced Umerov to move into international diplomacy. In the aftermath of the occupation, he accompanied Dzhemilev on international trips, meeting politicians and diplomats, speaking at conferences – raising the topic of Crimea’s occupation everywhere they could.
Umerov – who is fluent in English and Turkish – proved himself to be an effective negotiator, contributing to the backroom diplomatic work for the release of Ukrainian political prisoners. This has included developing very good relations with Turkish contacts, according to Akhtem Chiygoz, a Crimean Tatar MP who himself was arrested and imprisoned by the Russian authorities in 2015. After Turkey interceded in the wake of Chiygoz’s trial, he was extradited to Turkey and then returned to Ukraine. Chiygoz told openDemocracy he had no doubt Umerov was responsible for his release.
“[Umerov] was always in the shadow of this process,” Chiygoz says. “For him, the most important thing is the result.”
But from the shadows of diplomacy, Umerov later made the jump to politics proper – winning a seat in the Ukrainian parliament with the Golos party in 2019, headed at the time by Ukrainian rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk. In 2020, Umerov became co-chair of Crimean Platform, a cross-party grouping in the Ukrainian parliament. Umerov was also co-chair of the group on interparliamentary relations with Saudi Arabia and Turkey and deputy of the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). While in parliament, he gained the trust of Zelenskyi, thanks to his active work on Crimean issues and international relations. In August 2021, Zelenskyi awarded him a state medal, the Order of Merit.
“He understands that if Ukraine is defeated now, everything is lost”
Mustafa Dzhemilev According to Oleksandra Ustinova, a member of the Golos faction, and a former colleague of Umerov, he hates bureaucracy and has borrowed a lot from his business experience.
“If he sees that something is not working, he comes and says: we need to do everything differently,” Ustinova tells openDemocracy. For example, when he headed the State Property Fund in 2022, he brought in international auditing companies to assess the state of current affairs. His predecessor, Dmytro Sennychenko, is suspected by Ukrainian law enforcement of large-scale corruption. Sennychenko has not made a public statement on the allegations, and his whereabouts are currently unknown.
What has Umerov’s role been since Russia’s invasion? At the beginning of the Russian invasion, according to Dzhemilev, Umerov helped with the international supply of weapons to Ukraine, negotiating even with those countries that did not want to offer public support. Umerov himself is unlikely to talk about this; he does not like much attention to himself. “He understands that if Ukraine is defeated now, everything is lost,” explained Dzhemilev.
At the end of February 2022, Zelenskyi included Umerov in a delegation of just six Ukrainian officials involved in the first negotiations with Russia on the Ukraine-Belarus border. While those talks fell apart, Umerov went on to be involved in the murky, far-from-public negotiations for exchanging Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war. That includes the exchange of Viktor Medvedchuk and 55 Russian soldiers for 215 Ukrainian prisoners of war last September – a major deal mediated with the help of Turkish and Saudi Arabian officials.
The fact that a Crimean Tatar has been appointed defence minister – someone who is ethnically and spiritually connected to Crimea – is a signal for Ukrainian society
Umerov has also been leading on Ukraine’s contacts with Global South states, particularly the Arab world, Persian Gulf and Turkey, Tamila Tasheva, the Ukrainian president’s permanent representative on Crimea, told openDemocracy.
That role also appears to have put him in the crosshairs. Last year, international media reported that Umerov had been poisoned alongside Roman Abramovich – who participated in the negotiations from the Russian side – during the latter’s secret visit to Kyiv in March 2022. “He was definitely poisoned,” says Mustafa Dzhemilev, but he doesn’t know who is behind it, nor details of that visit to Kyiv. Both men later travelled to Turkey for medical examination.
What will Umerov bring to the Ministry of Defense? The search for a replacement for Oleksiy Reznikov, who headed Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense for almost two years, began this summer. Corruption scandals over the purchase of food at inflated prices and jackets of dubious quality for the military had shaken public faith in the ministry.
Zelenskyi’s office initially considered Oleksandr Kamyshin, minister of strategic industries and former railway chief, and Oleksandr Kubrakov, deputy prime minister for the reconstruction of Ukraine. But both ultimately decided to remain in their positions. Then Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelenskyi’s office, proposed Umerov as a candidate to the president, according to one of the Ukrainian MPs who followed the process.
That doesn’t mean that “Umerov is Yermak’s man”, says Vitaliy Shabunin, referring to the powerful head of Zelenskyi’s office. While his relationship is good with the Office of the President, Umerov is focused on results, rather than political intrigue, said Shabunin. “This is a tough and politically wise manager,” explains Shabunin.
Indeed, Umerov began his new post by firing all of the deputies who had worked under Reznikov. He also went to his first Ramstein meeting with Western allies, and to the USA and Canada with the Ukrainian president. Speaking in parliament on 6 September, the day of his appointment, Umerov outlined the main priorities for the ministerial post: providing the military with everything they need, zero tolerance for corruption, expanding Ukraine’s international coalition of partners, and supporting domestic military production.
Tetiana Nikolaenko, a Ukrainian journalist and member of the public anti-corruption council at the Ministry of Defense, says the ministry’s problems cannot be solved by simply dismissing deputies. Even if Umerov’s new deputies are “whiter than white”, it may later turn out that they will be drawn into some kind of murky scheme, even without their knowledge, Nikolaenko predicts.
This means that Umerov’s new deputies must quickly figure out how corruption schemes are organised inside the ministry and what urgently needs to be done to stop them, advises Nikolaenko, who has been on the public council for five months. “If there is a big scandal, there is a reaction,” Nikolaenko explains. “But if there is no scandal, there is no reaction.”
Still, there’s reason to be proud, emphasises Tamila Tasheva, the presidential representative in Crimea. The fact that a Crimean Tatar has been appointed defence minister – someone who is ethnically and spiritually connected to Crimea – is a signal for Ukrainian society, the residents of Crimea, and international politicians who believe that Ukraine should make territorial concessions in order to achieve peace, Tasheva explains.
That signal is simple: Ukraine will fight for Crimea until it is liberated from Russian occupation. “There will be no concessions on this issue,” says Tasheva.
At the time of publication, openDemocracy was unable to obtain comments from Rustem Umerov.