Oleksandr Valentynovych Turchynov (; born 31 March 1964) is a Ukrainian politician, screenwriter, Baptist minister and economist. He is the former Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine. In 2005, Turchynov served as the head of the Security Service of Ukraine. Turchynov is a former acting President of Ukraine from the removal from power of President Viktor Yanukovych on 21 February 2014, until Petro Poroshenko was sworn in as Ukrainian President on 7 June 2014. He then became Chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament until 27 November 2014. Turchynov also served as acting Prime Minister in 2010 (when he was the First Vice Prime Minister in the absence of a prime minister after Yulia Tymoshenko's government was dismissed on 3 March 2010) until the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) appointed Mykola Azarov as Prime Minister on 11 March 2010. Turchynov was the first deputy chairman of the political party Batkivshchyna (All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland") and a close associate of party leader Yulia Tymoshenko. He started the new political party People's Front in September 2014, now together with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. In June 2020 Turchynov became one of the managers of the headquarters of European Solidarity, a political party led by former president Petro Poroshenko. Early life and career Oleksandr Turchynov was born in Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro). He graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute in 1986, after which he worked at Kryvorizhstal, a large Ukrainian steel producer. From 1987 to 1990, he served as head of the agitation and propaganda division of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Komsomol (Communist Youth League) Committee, which was led by Serhiy Tihipko. Tihipko and Turchynov became political advisers of Leonid Kuchma, then head of Dnipropetrovsk-based Pivdenmash missile manufacturer. Kuchma and his entire team, including Tihipko and Turchynov, moved to Kyiv in 1992, after Kuchma was appointed Prime Minister. In 1993, Turchynov was formally appointed an advisor on economic issues to Prime Minister Kuchma. Turchynov is a long-time ally of Yulia Tymoshenko, another prominent Ukrainian political figure from Dnipropetrovsk. They used to have a common business in Dnipropetrovsk. In December 1993, Turchynov co-founded and became Vice President of Ukrainian Union of Industrialist and Entrepreneurs. In 1994 he created the political party Hromada together with Pavlo Lazarenko, a business ally of Tymoshenko. Turchynov was also director of the Economic Reforms Institute from January 1994 to March 1998 and was head of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences' Laboratory