Vasyl Yadukha

Yadukha was born on 25 January 1964 in the village of Verbka-Murovana, which was then part of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union.^[1] In 1986, he graduated from Podilskyi State Agro-Technical University with a specialty as an agronomist.^[1] Afterwords, he worked as a chief agronomist and then chairman at a collective farm until the collapse of the Soviet Union.^[1] Upon its collapse, in 1992 he became Head of the Department of Agriculture for the Yarmolyntsi Raion council until 1995.^[1] After 1995, he worked in various agricultural leadership roles, and by 2002 was Head of the Department for Agriculture of Khmelnytskyi Oblast.^[1] In 2005 he started heading the Khmelnytskyi Oblast branch of the Party of Regions, and became commercial director of the agricultural enterprise "Zinkiv" and "Zorianyi Shliakh.^[1]

In 2006-2007 Yadukha was a member of the Verkhovna Rada representing Party of Regions.^[2] In the 2007 Ukrainian parliamentary election heo failed to get reelected to parliament as a candidate of the same party.^[2]

In 2010-2014 he served as a Governor of Khmelnytskyi Oblast. In this role, he supported reforms by fellow Party of Regions member, Serhiy Hrynevetskyi , that would liquidate the city of Slavuta and would divide Ukraine into eight oblasts.^[3] Later, in 2017, the Prosecutor General's Office opened an investigation into whether during his time as governor he received funding from a shadow ledger of the Party of Regions, with accounting entries stated the total was $1.75 million.^[4]