Category Nation/CIS
Source RIA Novosti

KIEV — Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has dismissed Yuliya Tymoshenko's government. Yury Yekhanurov has been appointed acting prime minister. Before the appointment, Yekhanurov headed the Dnepropetrovsk region administration.

Yushchenko intends to instruct acting Prime Minister Yury Yekhanurov to form a new government, the president told Ukrainian television Thursday.

Yushchenko said he had "cut the Gordian knot for the sake of the nation" by dismissing Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko and her government.

"This is not a government crisis, this is a crisis of certain political personalities," Yushchenko said in a televised address to the nation Thursday.

"From morning until night we can hear light-minded, sweet promises, which will be harder and harder to deliver upon with every passing day," the president said. "The country is again facing accusations of corruption, of a lack of economic transparency, including in privatization. The processes that could be democratized dramatically are following yesterday's track."

Yushchenko attributed this to "the unawareness of the significance of national interests" and of every civil servant's duty to work for the benefit of the state and the public. He said Tymoshenko's government was too preoccupied with self-promotion to care about the voters.

Chairman of the Ukrainian Security Services Oleksandr Turchynov has resigned in protest of the government's dismissal, a spokesman for the Security Services told the Novosti-Ukraina news agency Thursday.

"I believe that under current conditions the decision to dismiss the government threatens the national security of Ukraine," Turchynov said in his resignation letter to President Viktor Yushchenko.