Volodymyr Volodymyrovych Usov is 36. He was born in Odesa on 23 September 1983 and graduated from Odesa National Maritime University. His political experience is modest: he belonged to the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, then to Batkivshchyna, and met with no success in elections to the city council or the Verkhovna Rada. His commercial ventures brought him renown. In 2011, with partners, he founded Gutenbergz, which produces interactive books and electronic textbooks. In 2013–2014 came the Kwambio factory, printing ceramic wares on 3D printers. In 2014 Kwambio won an international competition, and the company then entered the TechStars accelerator in Boston, where startups go through a short mentoring programme and attract the attention of investors. In 2017 Kwambio raised $500,000 from the funds Empire State Capital Partners and Impulse VC. The media linked the second fund to Roman Abramovich.
The competition and the appointment
The chain of events opened with the dismissal of Pavlo Dehtyarenko. On 3 November 2019, by Cabinet order No. 1021-r, he was relieved of his post, and the same day, by order No. 1039-r, a competition was announced to fill the vacancy. The selection ran from 25 to 29 November at the National Agency for the Civil Service, where 18 candidates took part. The candidates were put forward on the results of the selection by the Commission on the Senior Civil Service. On 27 December the government, following interviews, declared Usov the winner.
Then the procedure dragged on. From 3 January 2020 a lustration check proceeded under the law "On the Cleansing of Power," adopted on the basis of Cabinet Resolution No. 171 of 25 March 2015. Once it was completed, by order No. 60-r Usov was appointed for five years with a six-month probation period. In practice he began work at the agency on 5 February 2020, when he was introduced to the staff.
The appointment was attended by an oddity first noticed by the Aerospace Portal of Ukraine. The line about Usov in the news item on the government's personnel decisions of 24 January was removed from the Cabinet's website a couple of days later. The portal recorded this in screenshots on 26 and 27 January 2020. The order itself, however, was never rescinded.
The case running in parallel
The central question around the appointment was a criminal case connected with textbooks. The State Bureau of Investigation opened proceedings in June 2019. According to the outlet 368.media, tenders held by the Mykolaiv Regional State Administration in 2018–2019 brought the Gutenbergz dealer 12.9 million hryvnias, while the total sum for access to textbooks that were already supplied free of charge through the Ministry of Education and Science came to between 15 and 24 million hryvnias. On 25 November 2019 a court froze Gutenbergz's accounts. As TSN reported, searches on the night before the competition final took place at Usov's home and office. This was before the appointment, and none of the sources cited brought any suspicion against Usov personally. No verdict in the case has been reached.
MPs also came out against the appointment. As Antikor wrote, in July 2020 more than 100 people's deputies demanded Usov's dismissal. Against this backdrop, on 16 November 2020 the government relieved him of his post under Article 87 of the law on the civil service, and Mykhailo Lev, a participant in the 2019 competition, became acting head. Usov contested the decision: on 15 December 2020 he filed a suit in Kyiv's District Administrative Court against the Cabinet of Ministers and the State Space Agency. On 21 December the proceedings were opened, and a preparatory hearing was set for 18 January 2021.
What came next
The agency carried on as before. In February 2020 Ukraine joined the Artemis Accords, and in January 2021 the Deputy Prime Minister for Strategic Industries, Oleh Urusky, appointed Volodymyr Taftai, a finalist in that same 2019 competition, to head the State Space Agency. At the same time the government announced a billion-dollar programme.
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