In a video address on Sunday night, Volodymyr Zelenskiy named Umerov as the successor to Oleksii Reznikov, who is stepping down after 22 months in the job.
Umerov was born in Soviet Uzbekistan, the country his family had been exiled to under Stalin, and moved back to Crimea in Ukraine as a child when the Tatars were allowed to return in the 1980s and 1990s.
Since annexing the peninsula in 2014, Russia has persecuted Crimea’s Tatars, who account for 12-15% of its 2 million residents. Most continue to support Ukraine.
Umerov’s appointment is a clear signal that Kyiv is determined to expel Russia and its occupying forces from Crimea, defence ministry sources suggest. Some of Ukraine’s western allies including the US are privately sceptical about the feasibility of this ambition.
Umerov started out in the telecoms business in 2004 and was a successful businessman. In 2019 he was elected to parliament as a deputy for the pro-European Holos party.
There he served as co-chair of the Crimea Platform, an international diplomatic effort aimed at reversing Russia’s annexation. He has worked for years as an adviser to the longtime leader of the Crimean Tatars, Mustafa Dzhemilev.
In September last year he was named head of the State Property Fund, a particularly tough role in Ukraine, where the process of privatisation has been plagued by corruption.
In contrast to Reznikov, Umerov, 41, is not associated with any scandals. “He’s a zero problem person,” one source in Kyiv said. He is also known to have close personal relations with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – a vital regional partner for Ukraine – and with Saudi Arabia.
After the annexation and after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Umerov has taken part in behind-the-scenes talks with Russian officials, including negotiating high-profile prisoner exchanges and evacuations of civilians.
He was part of Ukraine’s delegation in negotiations with Russia in the first weeks of the war. According to reports, he was a victim of a suspected poisoning after a meeting with the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.
Umerov participated in talks on establishing an export corridor for Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea. Russia has since pulled out of the grain deal, accusing Ukraine and its allies of failing to uphold a part of the agreement to facilitate Russian exports.
The Crimean Tatars were once the biggest ethnic group in Crimea. Successive rulers in Moscow persecuted them, beginning with Catherine the Great in the late 18th century, and including Stalin, who in 1944 ordered the deportation of the entire Tatar population. After Vladimir Putin’s illegal takeover of Crimea, harassment, arrests and disappearances of Tatars resumed.
The Tatar community largely boycotted the Kremlin’s sham referendum in 2014, which it used to justify annexation.
Moscow then banned the Mejlis, the traditional assembly of the Tatar Muslim minority, declaring it an extremist organisation, and it has jailed members of the community since, citing security concerns.
“Russian propagandists invented the narrative of dividing the Ukrainian nation into ethnics to justify their military actions on the territory of our country,” Umerov, who is Muslim, told the Jordanian news site AmmanNet in an interview last year. “We do not feel any chauvinism or Islamophobia [in Ukraine] regarding our ethnicity or religion.”
In his video statement announcing the replacement on Sunday, Zelenskiy said MPs would be called to vote on Umerov’s nomination this week. The parliament “knows this person well and Mr Umerov does not need any additional introductions”, he said.
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