Oleksii Reznikov

Origins and early life

Oleksii Reznikov was born at Lviv in western Ukraine on 18 June 1966, and his connection to this directory is his paternal grandmother, a Jewish woman named Sarah; he has spoken of her publicly, and of relatives living at Bat Yam in Israel, in an interview given to Ha'aretz on 27 October 2022, the first he granted to an Israeli newspaper.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly that he was not raised in the Jewish religion, that the grandmother's family name is not given in the accessible sources, and that the descent rests on his own explicit public statement. He trained as a lawyer, practised commercial law in Kyiv for two decades and was known as one of the country's leading advocates, served as a deputy mayor of Kyiv, and from 2020 was deputy prime minister and minister for the reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories, in which post he negotiated in the Minsk format.

In November 2021 he was appointed minister of defence, three months before the Russian full-scale invasion. Through the first year and a half of the war his ministry was the point of contact for the coalition supplying Ukraine: he pressed publicly and privately for the successive deliveries — anti-tank weapons, artillery and HIMARS, air defence, and eventually western tanks — and coordinated the training of Ukrainian crews abroad and the integration of a dozen different national systems into one army under fire.

This fiche also states plainly the end of his tenure: in September 2023, amid corruption scandals in army procurement that reached his ministry though he was not personally charged, President Zelensky replaced him, saying the ministry needed new approaches. He was afterwards nominated as ambassador. Ukraine's defence ministry under his charge maintained close working relations with Israel on air-defence questions.