Viktoriia Petrivna Syumar – Ukrainian journalist, deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of the VIII and IX convocations, Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (2014).
Place of Birth, Education
She was born on October 23, 1977 in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
She graduated with honors from the Faculty of History of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
She also studied at the postgraduate school of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Career
Journalistic activity
For some time she taught history at school.
In the period from 1999 to 2003, Syumar worked as a freelance correspondent for the Voice of America radio station and a journalist for the Continent radio station.
From 2002 to 2005, she served as head of the policy department and hosted political programs at Hromadske Radio.
During 2005 – 2014, she held the position of executive director of the public organization “Institute of Mass Information”.
In the period from 2008 to 2010, she taught at the Institute of Journalism of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
She was a member of the public council at the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Freedom of Speech. In particular, she was a member of the National Commission for the Establishment of Freedom of Speech and the Development of the Information Sphere.
Since 2009, she has served as a chronicler of the Shuster Live program on the Ukraine TV channel.
In 2013, Syumar worked as a presenter on Channel 5 and was one of the founders of the CHESNO public movement.
In 2014, she was a member of the Maidan Council, and later served as Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC).
Political Activities
After the Revolution of Dignity, she joined the creation of a new party “Volya”.
In the parliamentary elections of 2014, she was elected as a people’s deputy from the People’s Front party as a non-partisan. She headed the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Freedom of Speech and Information Policy.
She was also a member of the inter-factional association “Eurooptimists”, was a member of the political council of the “People’s Front” party and served as deputy chairman of the parliamentary faction of the same name.
In 2015, Syumar was the deputy head of the election headquarters of the Petro Poroshenko Solidarity Bloc.
In 2019, she was elected a people’s deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of the 9th convocation from the European Solidarity party as a non-partisan. She joined the parliamentary faction of the same name and became a member of the Committee on Anti-Corruption Policy.
In the 2020 local elections, she ran for the Kyiv Regional Council as the first on the list of the European Solidarity party, but soon gave up her mandate.
In the period from 2022 to 2023, she was a member of the Temporary Investigative Commission of the Verkhovna Rada, which investigated the circumstances that contributed to the temporary occupation of Crimea.
Investigation
In 2018, she became a defendant in anti-corruption investigations of the CHESNO Movement. At the same time, analysts found discrepancies between the life of the deputy and her official declaration. Syumar lived in a house that was not indicated in the declaration and her mother was formally listed as the owner of the property and land, despite the fact that her income level did not allow her to purchase a plot and build a house near Kyiv.
Marital Status
In 2018, Syumar married Dmytro Khrystyuk, who at that time served as the first deputy mayor of Irpin
