President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky ranks first in the rating of the most influential Ukrainian officials, other top five officials also include Head of the President’s Office Andriy Yermak, Chief Presidential Assistant Serhiy Shefir, as well as Interior Minister of Ukraine Arsen Avakov and Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova.
The results of the research ‘Rating of Influence of Ukrainian Officials’ were announced by Lev Bondarenko, an analyst of the Ukrainian Politics Foundation /UP Foundation at the press conference held at Interfax-Ukraine.
According to him, more than 50 experts took part in the research, the questionnaire was formed of 130 participants-officials and among the criteria assessed were influence of the position held by the officials, directly their activities and connections and their team effectiveness. The research was conducted using the questionnaire survey during September 2020.
Bondarenko said that top 30 ranks of the rating of influence of Ukrainian officials include mainly representatives of the President’s Office, the Cabinet of Ministers and other civil servants that in the public eye.
In turn, the Head of the UP Foundation, a historian, political expert Kost Bondarenko presented an analytical report related to the rating of influence of Ukrainian officials.
“A lot has changed during the year. A lot of people who were considered influential at that time resigned and new influential actors appeared, thus the power became less amorphous, more monolithic,” he said.
Bondarenko said among the external players that influence the situation in Ukraine are the U.S. Department of State, the G7, the IMF, Israel, George Soros and Russia.
“We looked close at people who influence the president and his entourage … Andriy Yermak is attempting to become the closest confidant of the president, while other team members oppose him … Today we should talk about financial and industrial groups, not about classical oligarchs. But still the representatives of the Ukrainian domestic capital influence very actively the situation in Ukraine, and are somewhat a weak counterweight to the offensive of multinational enterprises,” he said.
