Oleksandr Turchynov

Biography

Oleksandr Turchynov was born in Dnipropetrovsk in 1964. After graduating from the city's metallurgical institute in 1986 he worked at the Kryvorizhstal steelworks and then led agitation and propaganda for the regional Komsomol. He followed Leonid Kuchma to Kyiv and in 1993 became his economic adviser as prime minister, while also running an economic reform institute.

A longtime ally of Yulia Tymoshenko, he co-founded the Hromada party in 1994 and entered parliament in 1998, then left with Tymoshenko in 1999 for Batkivshchyna, where he became first deputy leader. In 2005 he was the first civilian head of the Security Service of Ukraine, and in 2010 he briefly acted as prime minister after Tymoshenko's government fell. He came second in the 2008 Kyiv mayoral election.

When Viktor Yanukovych fled in February 2014, parliament elected Turchynov its speaker and made him acting president. In that role he faced Russia's seizure of Crimea and the armed uprising in the east, launching an anti-terrorist operation, until Petro Poroshenko took office in June. He then co-founded People's Front and served as secretary of the National Security and Defence Council from December 2014 until May 2019.

Turchynov is also a screenwriter and an elder and occasional lay preacher at a Baptist church in Kyiv. In 2020 he joined the leadership of Poroshenko's European Solidarity campaign.