Yanukovych-led coalition takes over in Ukraine parliament

Mar 11, 2010, 14:08 GMT

   Kiev - A coalition led by President Viktor Yanukovych formed a ruling majority in Ukraine's parliament on Thursday and immediately voted into power a new cabinet.

   The first act of the new parliamentary majority, headed by Yanukovych's Party of Regions, was to select Mykola Azarov, a long-time Yanukovych ally, for the office of prime minister.

   A total of 245 parliamentarians in the 450-seat legislature supported Azarov's candidacy, and 240 voted to approve a cabinet slate submitted by Azarov.

   Azarov, an experienced technocrat with reportedly few political ambitions of his own, had been widely predicted to get the prime minister's job. He said his top priority was returning Ukrainian government finances to a solid footing.

   Former national bank chief Serhy Tihipko, who took a suprise third place in Ukraine's recent presidential contest, was named one of Yanukovych's vice premiers.

   A politician who supports market reforms and fighting corruption, Tihipko is was one of the few persons not long associated with Yanukovych to receive a cabinet post.

   Almost all of Yanukovych's other cabinet appointments were senior members of the Regions party, long-time allies of Yanukovych, or both.

   As widely predicted, the new ruling coaltion is an alliance of Yanukovych's Regions party, the Communist Party of Ukraine, parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Litvin's party, and independent parliamentarians.

   Factions loyal to former President Viktor Yushchenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshnenko, whom Yanukovych defeated in a February 7 run-off election, boycotted the cabinet vote.

   One of the most prominent members of Yanukovych's new cabinet is vice premier Borys Kolesnykov, a businessman. Kolesnykov was briefly jailed in 2005 on treason charges stemming from his public suggestion during Ukraine's pro-democracy Orange Revolution that the Donetsk region should secede from Ukraine. Those charges were eventually dropped.

   Kolesnikov, like Yanukovych, is a native of Ukraine's ethnically Russian Donetsk province.

   Vasyl Tsushko, a career politician working as a senior police official loyal to Yanukovych since 2006, was named to head the Interior Ministry.

   Parliamentarian Nestor Shufrich, a politician well-known in Ukraine for sometimes using his fists on critics, was named to head the high-profile Emergency Situations Ministry, Ukraine's main response agency to accidents and natural disasters.

   Many of the new ministers have substantial government experience, one of the pledges made by Yanukovych during his election campaign. Finance Minister Fedor Yarushcheko served since the late 1990s in increasingly responsible posts in the national tax inspectorate.