President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree on the appointment of Viktor Mayko with a new ambassador in Kazakhstan. The document is published on the website of the head of state.
The diplomat previously headed the Ukrainian embassy in Turkmenistan. Before that, he held the post of deputy head of the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine, from 2014 to 2020 he headed the foreign policy.
The position of the Ambassador of Ukraine in Kazakhstan remained vacant in the fall of 2022 after the resignation of Pyotr Vrublevsky, who ended up in the center of the diplomatic scandal. The reason was an interview with the head of the diplomatic mission in August 2022 by the Kazakhstan blogger Diaz Kuzairov. Commenting on the “special operation” of the Russian Federation, Vrubblevsky then said: “The more we kill Russians now, the less we will have to kill them to our children.”
This statement caused a wide resonance. The Foreign Ministry of Kazakhstan called Vrubblevsky and protested, after which the diplomat apologized, but received an undesirable status in the country. In the fall of 2022, the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky fired Vrubblevsky from the post of ambassador.