The head of Ukraine’s reconstruction agency has resigned a day before an international conference on the country’s long-term reconstruction, saying he had been prevented from attending after being systematically undermined by the Ukrainian government from doing his job.
Mustafa Nayyem announced his resignation in a Facebook post on Monday after previously sending a strongly worded message to a number of foreign partners criticising the Ukrainian administration for a wide range of mistakes.
Nayyem said the final straw was when his permission to travel to Berlin was revoked.
The two-day Ukraine recovery conference starts in Berlin on Tuesday and is due to be addressed by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
The German government has described it as sending an important signal to Ukrainians about the long-term future of their country. Critics have called for a refocusing to increase Ukraine’s current resilience, by for instance preventing prolonged energy blackouts this winter.
The conference will include the launch of 95 investment projects for which it is hoped western funding will be secured, as well as a range of reform targets. The country’s future accession to the EU will also be discussed, in what organisers have referred to as a “fourth dimension” of the conference agenda.
Hosted by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, attendees are to include a range of senior international diplomats and foreign ministers, from Dmytro Kuleba of Ukraine to the UK’s David Cameron. Several Ukrainian mayors from big cities including Kyiv and Lviv are expected to attend.
In Nayyem’s letter, obtained by the Guardian, and in his posting to Facebook, he was deeply critical of the style of governance around Ukraine’s reconstruction while stopping short of criticising Zelenskiy directly. He said effectively his job, which he described as “the most challenging work of my life”, was made impossible to carry out.
Included in a long list of complaints, Nayyem expressed regret at:
The lack of “government approval for the payment of $150m (£118m) borrowed from the European Investment Bank for critical projects including water supply and energy protection”.
Being “plagued by inexplicable bureaucratic delays”.
A “significant reduction in salaries” at his agency (a senior expert now earns the equivalent of €320 [£270] a month) leading to a loss of a quarter of staff since January.
Nayyem said the “persistent opposition, resistance and the creation of artificial barriers” his agency had faced had “rendered it impossible to effectively fulfil my duties”. The delays and hold-ups had resulted in “loss of trust from the market, local authorities and citizens”, he said.
While admitting “mistakes and shortcomings” that he said were “inevitable in implementing projects of such complexity and under such conditions”, he said the agency had delivered a wide range of valuable successes, was now coordinating work on 353 construction sites across the country and had restored nearly 1,300km of roads and 330 bridges damaged in the conflict as well as building 155km of main water pipeline in the Dnipropetrovsk region, after the Russian military destroyed the Kakhovka dam.
Nayyem’s resignation follows the dismissal last month of the minister of infrastructure, Oleksandr Kubrakov, under whom he was appointed, and with whom he said he had worked closely.
In recent months, Ukraine’s foreign allies have become increasingly concerned over what they describe as centralising tendencies in Zelenskiy’s administration. Kubrakov’s firing has added to those concerns.
Kubrakov was widely respected by international partners. One diplomatic source in Kyiv described his firing just before the Berlin conference as “a bit of a disaster, image-wise”. This will be compounded by Nayyem resigning on the eve of the conference.
Nayyem said in his letter that Kubrakov’s dismissal had made the work impossible, and “the government’s recent decision to cancel my official participation in the Ukraine recovery conference in Berlin confirmed this”, he added.
As western diplomats expressed concerns over the dismissal of Kubrakov, not least the embarrassment of the conference taking place without him, Josh Rudolph, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund thinktank, said Kubrakov’s dismissal was regrettable, as he had been regarded as an innovator in fighting corruption and building transparency. “Central power has come to wipe out the team that was building a transparent system of national restoration and replaces it with loyalists,” he said.
Nayyem, who was born in Afghanistan but moved to Ukraine as a child, became one of the country’s leading journalists. In November 2013, he called for street protests against a decision by the government of Viktor Yanukovych to back out of a trade agreement with the EU under Russian pressure. The protests eventually became the Maidan revolution that toppled Yanukovych and his government.
After the revolution, Nayyem became an MP. In 2021, he was appointed deputy minister of infrastructure, and in early 2023 was made head of Ukraine’s state agency for reconstruction, tasked with dealing with the destruction wrought by the Russian invasion even as it continued. The job involved “planning with short-term horizons”, Nayyem told the Guardian last year, as it was never clear what Russia could strike next. But it also involved drawing up longer-term plans for when the war ends.
