Minister of Education reveals he has been serving in Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Forces

Ukrainska Pravda  – Thursday, 16 June 2022

Serhii Shkarlet, Ukraine’s Minister of Education and Science, is serving in a volunteer unit of the Territorial Defence Forces.

He shared this information in a comment to Suspilne.

Shkarlet said he wanted to join the Territorial Defence back in April, but was unable to due to a military protocol on the activities of the Cabinet of Ministers.

The Minister noted that the state would take the decision on when to mobilise him. He also has his own hunting weapons and knows how to use them.

Earlier Mykhailo Nakonechnyi, a member of Kyiv City Council, posted a photo of himself with Serhii Shkarlet and Maksym Lutskyi, the rector of the National Aviation University.

All the men were posing in military uniforms and bulletproof vests and holding machine guns in Kyiv at a time when the Russian aggressors had already left the outskirts of the capital.

These photos triggered outrage on social media. Serhii Shkarlet later said that he was criticised by "armchair warriors" (a term usually used to describe social media users implying their lack of experience and ability to objectively assess an event or phenomenon - ed.). 

The Minister has now commented differently on the scandalous photo.

"I showed up, I'm a man who had the rank of lieutenant colonel at the time, who owns a weapon, and who had wanted to enrol in the Territorial Defence ever since the early days. And the fact that this is a photo…

Objectively, I didn't take it when it was recorded, this photo was taken at the request of the leader of this Territorial Defence group, I did not share it. I was absolutely not in the habit of sharing photos," said the Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine.