Rustem Umerov: Who is Ukraine's next defence minister?

Rustem Umerov, who is set to replace Oleksii Reznikov as Ukraine's defence minister, has a history of holding key negotiations with Russia.

He represented his country in peace talks at the beginning of Moscow's full-scale invasion in 2022.

He has been a key force in securing the safe repatriation of high-profile prisoners, and has participated in negotiations to ensure the safe export of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea.

A leading member of the Crimean Tatar community, a Turkic population indigenous to the Crimean peninsular, Mr Umerov has also become a central figure in President Volodymyr Zelenksy's outreach initiatives to Islamic countries.

He was born in 1982 in Samarkand, Soviet Uzbekistan - where his Muslim family had been exiled along with 200,000 Tatars during the rule of Joseph Stalin.

He moved back to Crimea in Ukraine as a child when the Tatars - who fought against Nazism in the Second World War - were finally allowed to return from the 1980s.

"The deportation of Crimean Tatars is one of the greatest crimes of the Soviet regime," he wrote in a piece for Liga.net in 2021. "It was started by the tyrants in power at that time in order to exterminate an entire nation."

He used the same article to attack the Russia's 2014 annexation of the Black Sea peninsula.

Mr Umerov holds a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's degree in finance. The 41-year-old started his career working in the telecoms industry.

In 2013, he founded the investment company ASTEM and a linked charity programme that was set up to train Ukrainian politicians, lawyers and community leaders at Stanford University in the US.

He was elected to the Ukrainian parliament in 2019, and was later made head of the State Property Fund - a government agency that sells state assets to private investors. This was seen as a challenging role in a country where privatisation has been dogged by corruption.

For many years, Mr Umerov advised Mustafa Dzhemilev, the historic leader of Crimean Tatars. He was also co-chair of the Crimea Platform, an international diplomatic initiative focused on negotiating with Russia following its 2014 occupation of the peninsula.

Speaking to the BBC soon after Moscow's full-scale invasion, he said he was determined "to find [a] political and diplomatic resolution to this brutal invasion".

He allegedly suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning, including peeling skin and sore eyes, during peace negotiations in March 2022 - alongside Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who was involved in the talks as well.

But Mr Umerov later denied the reports, warning people not to trust "unverified information".

In his televised address to the nation on Sunday, President Zelensky confirmed he would seek parliamentary approval to make Mr Umerov his new defence minister, saying the ministry "requires fresh approaches and new modes of engagement with both the military and society at large."