Ukraine appoints head of major aid fund as deputy minister of strategic industries

The Cabinet of Ministers appointed Hanna Hvozdyar, who is the director of the Serhiy Prytula Charitable Foundation, as deputy minister of strategic industries, reported the representative of the government in the Verkhovna Rada, Taras Melnychuk.

"Appointed: Hanna Yuriyivna Hvozdyar as deputy minister of strategic industries of Ukraine; Lyudmyla Vitaliyivna Darahan as state secretary of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine," he wrote.

The Foundation has not yet announced the resignation of Hvozdyar, who has been the director of the organization since its inception in 2020. She has been volunteering since 2014.

Appointed to the Ministry of Defense, Darahan has a legal education, worked in the legal department of the apparatus of a political party, as an assistant to the minister of justice, head of the office of MP Oleksiy Poroshenko, the son of the fifth president.

From 2019 to 2022, she worked as the State Secretary of the Ministry of Veterans Affairs.

In July 2023, she was appointed deputy head of the State Property Fund under Rustem Umerov, who is now the defense minister.

Also, the Cabinet of Ministers dismissed the State Secretary of the Ministry of Veterans' Affairs – Vitaliy Zahaynyi.

Previously, he was the head of the regional policy department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, before that he worked as the deputy head of the Lviv Oblast State Administration and the first deputy head of the Chernihiv Oblast State Administration.

Before that, Zahainyi headed non-governmental organizations for 15 years.

Ukraine's Defense Intelligence reported that the ICEYE space satellite, which the volunteers crowdfunded for, played a "very important role" in the recent attack by the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Sevastopol Bay.

On September 18, the Cabinet of Ministers dismissed almost all the deputy ministers of defense: Volodymyr Havrylov, Rostislav Zamlynskyi, Hanna Malyar, Denys Sharapov, Andriy Shevchenko, Vitaliy Deynega, and Kostyantyn Vashchenko (he was the department's state secretary).