Yuri Boyko
At the first all-Ukrainian congress of the newly-established Republican Party of Ukraine on April 23, 2005, Yuri Boyko was elected chairman of the party. Since then he has lead the party in its rapid growth. Under his leadership, in just a few months the party opened 150 offices around Ukraine, and recruited 80,000 members.

Boyko comes from a background of senior government administration and business leadership. Most recently, he was deputy minister of fuel and energy until the beginning of 2005, and from early 2002 to the beginning of 2005 the chairman of Naftogaz Ukraine, the country’s largest company.

As chairman of Naftogaz, Boyko dramatically improved the performance of the company, doubling income, tripling exploration investments, paying off huge debts to Russia ($1.43 billion) and Turkmenistan ($310 million) as well as doubling pay to employees in the oil and gas sector, all the while contributing taxes that amounted to 10 percent of the Ukrainian state budget. He was voted Best Businessmen for 2003 by Kommersant magazine.

Boyko has a degree in chemical engineering from the Mendeleyev Chemical Engineering Institute in Moscow (1981) and a degree in planning engineering from East Ukraine University (2001). He was born in Horlivka, the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, in 1958. He is married, with five children.