Ukraine's Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk submitted his resignation and President Volodymur Zelenskiy will consider it, according to the presidential office on Friday.
Honcharuk’s resignation aims to prevent any speculations about disrespect of government members for the chief of state, according to Ukrainian local media.
"I came to the position of fulfilling the program of the President. He is for me a model of openness and decency," Honcharuk said on Facebook. "However, in order to take away any doubts about our respect and trust in the President, I wrote a letter of resignation and handed it to the president with the right to submit it to the parliament to cast away any doubts of our respect and trust to the president.”
Two days ago, a three-part audio recording during a meeting between the premier and a few ministers and top officials from the National Bank was leaked online in an apparent attempt to poison President Volodymyr Zelensky’s opinion of Honcharuk.
According to Honcharuk, as heard in the taped recording, Zelensky had the wrong understanding of the reasons for the strengthening of Ukraine’s national currency, the hryvnia, which hurt the country’s exporters and reduced tax income.
“Zelensky has a very primitive understanding of the economy,” Honcharuk said, adding that he himself is a “dummy” in economics, too.
Also present at the meeting were Finance Minister Oksana Markarova, her deputy Yuriy Butsa, Economy Minister Timofiy Mylovanov, head of the National Bank Yakiv Smolii and his deputies Kateryna Rozhkova and Dmytro Sologub, and Oleksandra Betliy, a senior economist at the Finance Ministry.
In last August, President Zelensky chose Honcharuk, a 35-year-old lawyer, to be the country’s new prime minister. At that time, Zelensky said the time had come for reforms to “shift into fifth gear” and also to “end the war” in eastern Ukraine which began after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
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