Oleksandr Valentynovych Turchynov (, ; born 31 March 1964) is a Ukrainian politician, screenwriter, Baptist minister and economist. He is the former Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine.
In 2005, Turchynov served as the head of the Security Service of Ukraine. Turchynov is a former acting President of Ukraine from the removal from power of President Viktor Yanukovych on 21 February 2014, until Petro Poroshenko was sworn in as Ukrainian President on 7 June 2014. He then became Chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament until 27 November 2014. Turchynov also served as acting Prime Minister in 2010 (when he was the First Vice Prime Minister in the absence of a prime minister after Yulia Tymoshenko's government was dismissed on 3 March 2010) until the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) appointed Mykola Azarov as prime minister on 11 March 2010.
Turchynov was the first deputy chairman of the political party Batkivshchyna (All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland") and a close associate of party leader Yulia Tymoshenko. He started the new political party People's Front in September 2014, now together with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. In June 2020, Turchynov became one of the managers of the headquarters of European Solidarity, a political party led by former president Petro Poroshenko.
Early life and career Oleksandr Turchynov was born in Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro). He graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute in 1986, after which he worked at Kryvorizhstal, a large Ukrainian steel producer. From 1987 to 1990, he served as head of the agitation and propaganda division of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Komsomol (Communist Youth League) Committee, which was led by Serhiy Tihipko. Tihipko and Turchynov became political advisers of Leonid Kuchma, then head of Dnipropetrovsk-based Pivdenmash missile manufacturer. Kuchma and his entire team, including Tihipko and Turchynov, moved to Kyiv in 1992, after Kuchma was appointed Prime Minister. In 1993, Turchynov was formally appointed an advisor on economic issues to Prime Minister Kuchma.
Turchynov is a long-time ally of Yulia Tymoshenko, another prominent Ukrainian political figure from Dnipropetrovsk. They used to have a common business in Dnipropetrovsk. In December 1993, Turchynov co-founded and became Vice President of Ukrainian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. In 1994, he created the political party Hromada together with Pavlo Lazarenko, a business ally of Tymoshenko. Turchynov was also director of the Economic Reforms Institute from January 1994 to March 1998 and was head of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences' Laboratory of Shadow Economy Research.Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko members biography's, Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko official website
Political life
In 1998, he was elected to the Verkhovna Rada as a member of Hromada. Following Lazarenko's flight from Ukraine, he left the faction and party (during May 1999) together with Yulia Tymoshenko's All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland". He was re-elected to parliament in 2002 and 2006 as part of the BYuT.
On 4 February 2005, Turchynov was appointed and served as the first‐ever civilian head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). With the approval of Turchynov as the head of the SBU, he dissolved the investigation team that was investigating the Georgiy Gongadze case since 2002. According to the first deputy head of the Main Investigation Department of the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine Roman Shubin, Turchynov ordered not to provide operational data on the Gongadze case to the investigation group of the Security Service of Ukraine.
On 15 June 2005, after the SBU had started an investigation by Turchynov in May 2005, Tymoshenko charged that Dmytro Firtash and others, including his Nicosia, Cyprus-based Highrock Holdings had been central to over $1 billion stolen from Ukraine through his Turkmenistan gas scheme involving both Eural Trans Gas and RosUkrEnergo. On 8 September 2005, Yushchenko dismissed Tymoshenko and subsequently, on 23 September 2005, the SBU investigation into the missing money was halted by direct order of Yushchenko according to Turchynov.
In August 2007, Turchynov replied to the accusation that his stance on same-sex marriage is typically conservative, "I do not agree. If a man has normal views, then you label him a conservative, but those who use drugs or promote sodomy, you label them a progressive person. All of these are perversions".
In the spring of 2008, he was the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and the Our Ukraine–People's Self-Defense Bloc candidate for the Mayor of Kyiv election he placed second at the election with 218,600 votes (19.13% of total vote).
In December 2009, during the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election campaign, Turchynov accused President Viktor Yushchenko and opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych of coordinating their actions in their attempts to topple the Second Tymoshenko Government. From December 2009 until March 2010, the adviser to Turchynov in the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine was Andriy Slyusarchuk, a Ukrainian fraudster.
On 4 March 2010, after the fall of the second Tymoshenko Government, Yulia Tymoshenko resigned from her post as prime minister on 4 March 2010, and Turchynov was empowered to fulfill the Prime Minister's duties until a new government was formed. On 11 March 2010, the Azarov Government was elected, and Mykola Azarov was appointed prime minister the same day. According to WikiLeaks, Prosecutor-General of Ukraine Oleksandr Medvedko ordered former Minister of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lutsenko to arrest Yulia Tymoshenko's allies – Oleksandr Turchynov and Andriy Kozhemiakin – for destroying the documents of the Security Service of Ukraine in which the connection between Tymoshenko and the criminal businessman Semion Mogilevich was proven.
In 2012 he was re-elected into the Verkhovna Rada, on the party list of Batkivshchyna. In the final days of Euromaidan, on 21 February 2014 the Verkhovna Rada passed a law that reinstated the 8 December 2004 amendments of the constitution. This was passed under simplified procedure without any decision of the relevant committee and was passed in the first and the second reading in one sitting by 386 deputies. The law was approved by 140 MPs of the Party of Regions, 89 MPs of Batkivshchyna, 40 MPs of UDAR, 32 of the Communist Party, and 50 independent lawmakers. According to Radio Free Europe, however, the measure was not signed by the then-President Viktor Yanukovych, who was subsequently removed from office.
The reinstitution of the 2004 amendments was proscribed in the Agreement on settlement of political crisis in Ukraine to be adopted within 48 hours after signing of the agreement (21 February 2014). All of that was taking place during the already ongoing concealed annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and the 2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Under the provision of the Constitution with 2004 amendments, a chairman of parliament is the next in succession of power in the country and such provision existed before adaptation of the Constitution back in 1996.
On 22 February 2014, he was elected as speaker of Verkhovna Rada. On 23 February 2014, Turchynov was designated as interim President of Ukraine following the impeachment of Viktor Yanukovych per the reinstated constitutional provisions of the 2004 amendments. On 25 February Turchynov assumed the (Presidential power of) command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. A day earlier were also scheduled early presidential elections on 25 May, for which Oleksandr Turchynov did not register. On 27 February, Arseniy Yatsenyuk was appointed the new prime minister under acting president Turchynov.
In early March 2014, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, stated he did not regard Turchynov as the legitimate Ukrainian President. Following attacks on law enforcement, security institutions and capture of government buildings, Turchynov offered for the unmarked militants with Russian flags to lay down arms and vacate government buildings for negotiations. Upon refusal, he finally sanctioned a big scale anti-terrorist operation headed by the Security Service of Ukraine. Earlier on 8 April 2014 another short-term anti-terrorist operation led by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine freed up government buildings in Kharkiv.
On 13 April 2014, Russia confirmed that it began a large scale military exercise in the Rostov, Belgorod and Kursk Oblasts, on the border with Ukraine, involving more than 8,000 troops and which would continue until the end of March. In April 2014, Russia announced another military exercise in the same region (Southern Russia).
On 14 April 2014, while talking on the phone with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Turchynov asked for the United Nations's support regarding the crisis in eastern Ukraine, to which the Secretary-General replied that peacekeepers may be sent in should Russia withhold its veto. Meanwhile, Turchynov issued a deadline to the pro-Russian insurgents to disarm and dismantle their barricades, but the deadline passed without incident. Before he issued a deadline, which was scheduled for 9 am, he tried to negotiate with insurgents and even proposed to hold referendum on the same day as elections which will be on 25 May. His proposition was questioned by journalists who feared that the referendum might be sabotaged by pro-Russia insurgents. Petro Poroshenko was elected President of Ukraine on 25 May 2014. Poroshenko was sworn in as Ukrainian President on 7 June 2014, this ended the presidential powers of Turchynov.
On 10 September 2014, Turchynov became founding member the new party People's Front. In an interview with the BBC, Turchynov admitted that in 2014, when the first volunteers went to war, he was personally giving them weapons, but not all were clean in the eyes of the law: "And I personally signed the orders for the weapons, many were worried about what would happen if they did not follow those orders with a weapons. Indeed, we didn't check anyone at that time, if they were convicted previously or not – whoever said that they are ready to defend the country, signed up, received weapons and went to the East of our country." In an interview given to VICE, he declared concerning his decision: "If it happened again, I would do the same thing". (2 minutes, 50 seconds) On 21 September 2014, he said that Russia doesn't admit that their soldiers are fighting in Ukraine. He also stated that Russia is the main aggressor, and that during the conflict, Ukraine had lost over 1,000 lives with hundreds missing. During the same Facebook message, he compared the conflict to the butterflies, a metaphor to one of Ray Bradbury's works. Turchynov was elected his party's faction leader on 27 November 2014. On 16 December 2014, President Poroshenko appointed Turchynov as Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine. According to the social poll of the "Sofia" centre, in June 2017, only 0.9% of respondents said that they completely trust Turchynov, 9.5% trust him, 24.1% do not trust him, 57.4% do not trust him at all. On 1 November 2018, Turchynov was included in the Russian sanctions list in connection with Ukraine's unfriendly actions towards citizens and legal entities of the Russian Federation.
On 11 December 2018, in response to the fact that 66 city councils and 12 regional councils had adopted the term "gender" instead of "sex", he published on his website an article he wrote called "Neo-Marxism or a trip to the abyss". In this article he drew a parallel between Marxists and "neo-Marxists", and declared the latter "offe[r] society a struggle for the rights of the new "oppressed", assigning to them the role of emancipated women, homosexuals, lesbians, transgender people, and others like that."