This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has dismissed the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council from his post, according to a decree published on the president’s official website.
Oleksandr Danylyuk offered to quit before Zelenskiy traveled to the United States last week to attend the UN General Assembly in New York, the president’s office said on September 27.
Danylyuk later confirmed he had resigned.
He and the presidential office gave no reason for the decision.
Danylyuk was appointed to the post on May 28 shortly after Zelenskiy took office. He was one of the most experienced members of the neophyte president’s administration, having served as finance minister and worked at the London and Moscow offices of leading consulting firm McKinsey before that.
During the president’s election campaign, Danylyuk acted as a senior adviser and was often seen accompanying Zelenskiy during meetings with foreign lenders, and international business and diplomatic communities.
As finance minister for two years under former President Petro Poroshenko, Danylyuk was Ukraine’s point man for talks with the Washington-based International Monetary Fund. During his tenure, Danylyuk also took part in nationalizing the country’s biggest lender, Privatbank, when a hole of nearly $6 billion was found on the bank’s balance sheet.
Previously, Danylyuk was Poroshenko’s representative in the Cabinet of Ministers and later the deputy head of the presidential administration.
He was born into a family of scientists in what was then the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic in 1975, but his parents moved back to Kyiv soon after his birth. His father is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine while his mother taught cybernetics at the Ihor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnical Institute.
