Mustafa Nayyem

Mustafa Masi Nayyem (Ukrainian: Мустафа Найєм, Pashto: مصطفی نعیم; born June 28, 1981) is an Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, MP, lecturer at the Kyiv School of Economics,[2] and public figure who was influential in sparking the Euromaidan in Ukraine.

[12] In 1987 and because of the destruction of the ongoing Soviet Union's War in Afghanistan, his father went to Moscow to study and met Ukrainian Valentina Kolechko whom he later married in early 1989.

[12] Mustafa Nayyem became fluent in Russian and Ukrainian after he moved with his father to Moscow in August 1989[a] living near the Nakhimovsky Prospekt metro station and later to Kyiv in 1990 attending 61st school near the Lukyanivsky market.

[13] His brother Masi Nayem is a lawyer and, in April 2016, deployed as a Ukrainian paratrooper to the Donbas - Avdiivka industrial zone which was the hottest point of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

[19] Nayyem worked as a reporter for the Kommersant-Ukrainy newspaper from 2005 to 2007, and then for Shuster LIVE, a political talk show on Ukrainian television, from 2007 to 2011.

In 2009, Nayyem received national attention following Ukrayina TV channel's live discussion with then-presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych.

In 2010, Nayem was briefly detained by police officers, reportedly as a result of racial profiling for "persons of Caucasian appearance" (a common local term for people from the Caucasus).

[3] His post[b] on Facebook on November 21, 2013, was a summons to rally for the Euromaidan protests which led to the overthrow of the Yanukovych government, in the so-called Revolution of Dignity.

[27] Gradually he began to criticize the Petro Poroshenko Bloc (PPB) more and more and stopped voting in sync with it.

[29] From Autumn 2015 until June 2016, he had been part of an attempt to form a political party around then Governor of Odesa Oblast Mikheil Saakashvili with members of the parliamentary group Interfactional Union "Eurooptimists", Democratic Alliance and possibly Self Reliance until this projection collapsed in June 2016.

[46][4] On 28 January 2023 the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine appointed Nayyem as head of the State Agency for Restoration and Infrastructure Development.

Mustafa Nayyem at Euromaidan on 23 November 2013
Nayyem receiving the Oleksandr Kryvenko award