and
Oleh Tyahnybok with coalition agreement before
2012 Ukrainian parliamentary election. in parliament, 24 February 2014 In
1998, he was elected to the
Verkhovna Rada as a member of Hromada. Following Lazarenko's flight from Ukraine, he left the faction and party (during May 1999) together with Yulia Tymoshenko's
All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland". He was re-elected to parliament in 2002 and 2006 as part of the
BYuT. On 4 February 2005, Turchynov was appointed and served as the first‐ever civilian head of the
Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). With the approval of Turchynov as the head of the SBU, he dissolved the investigation team that was investigating the
Georgiy Gongadze case since 2002. According to the first deputy head of the Main Investigation Department of the
Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine Roman Shubin, Turchynov ordered not to provide operational data on the Gongadze case to the investigation group of the Security Service of Ukraine. On 15 June 2005, after the SBU had started an investigation by Turchynov in May 2005, Tymoshenko charged that
Dmytro Firtash and others, including his
Nicosia, Cyprus-based Highrock Holdings had been central to over $1 billion stolen from Ukraine through his
Turkmenistan gas scheme involving both
Eural Trans Gas and
RosUkrEnergo. On 8 September 2005, Yushchenko dismissed Tymoshenko and subsequently, on 23 September 2005, the SBU investigation into the missing money was halted by direct order of Yushchenko according to Turchynov. In August 2007, Turchynov replied to the accusation that his stance on
same-sex marriage is typically conservative, "I do not agree. If a man has normal views, then you label him a conservative, but those who use drugs or promote sodomy, you label them a progressive person. All of these are
perversions". In the spring of 2008, he was the
Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and the
Our Ukraine–People's Self-Defense Bloc candidate for the
Mayor of Kyiv election he placed second at the election with 218,600 votes (19.13% of total vote). In December 2009, during the
2010 Ukrainian presidential election campaign, Turchynov accused
President Viktor Yushchenko and opposition leader
Viktor Yanukovych of coordinating their actions in their attempts to topple the
Second Tymoshenko Government. From December 2009 until March 2010, the adviser to Turchynov in the
Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine was
Andriy Slyusarchuk, a Ukrainian fraudster. On 4 March 2010, after the fall of the second Tymoshenko Government,
Yulia Tymoshenko resigned from her post as prime minister on 4 March 2010, On 11 March 2010, the
Azarov Government was elected, and
Mykola Azarov was appointed prime minister the same day. In
2012 he was re-elected into the Verkhovna Rada, on the party list of Batkivshchyna. In the final days of
Euromaidan, on 21 February 2014 the Verkhovna Rada passed a law that reinstated the 8 December 2004 amendments of the constitution. According to
Radio Free Europe, however, the measure was not signed by the then-President
Viktor Yanukovych, who was subsequently removed from office. The reinstitution of the 2004 amendments was proscribed in the
Agreement on settlement of political crisis in Ukraine to be adopted within 48 hours after signing of the agreement (21 February 2014). All of that was taking place during the already ongoing concealed
annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and the
2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Under the provision of the
Constitution with 2004 amendments, a chairman of parliament is the next in succession of power in the country and such provision existed before adaptation of the Constitution back in 1996. On 22 February 2014, he was elected as speaker of
Verkhovna Rada. per the reinstated constitutional provisions of the 2004 amendments. On 25 February Turchynov assumed the (Presidential power of) command of the
Ukrainian Armed Forces. for which Oleksandr Turchynov did not register. On 27 February,
Arseniy Yatsenyuk was appointed the new prime minister under acting president Turchynov. In early March 2014,
Vladimir Putin, President of
Russia, stated he did not regard Turchynov as the legitimate Ukrainian President. Following attacks on law enforcement, security institutions and capture of government buildings, Turchynov offered for the unmarked militants with Russian flags to lay down arms and vacate government buildings for negotiations. On 13 April 2014, Russia confirmed that it began a large scale military exercise in the
Rostov,
Belgorod and
Kursk Oblasts, on the
border with Ukraine, involving more than 8,000 troops and which would continue until the end of March. In April 2014, Russia announced another military exercise in the same region (
Southern Russia). On 14 April 2014, while talking on the phone with Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon, Turchynov asked for the
United Nations's support regarding
the crisis in eastern Ukraine, to which the Secretary-General replied that
peacekeepers may be sent in should Russia withhold its veto. Meanwhile, Turchynov issued a deadline to the pro-Russian insurgents to disarm and dismantle their barricades, but the deadline passed without incident. Before he issued a deadline, which was scheduled for 9 am, he tried to negotiate with insurgents and even proposed to hold referendum on the same day as elections which will be on 25 May. His proposition was questioned by journalists who feared that the referendum might be sabotaged by pro-Russia insurgents.
Petro Poroshenko was
elected President of Ukraine on 25 May 2014. Poroshenko was sworn in as Ukrainian President on 7 June 2014, this ended the presidential powers of Turchynov. On 10 September 2014, Turchynov became founding member the new party
People's Front. In an interview with the
BBC, Turchynov admitted that in 2014, when the first volunteers went to war, he was personally giving them weapons, but not all were clean in the eyes of the law: "And I personally signed the orders for the weapons, many were worried about what would happen if they did not follow those orders with a weapons. Indeed, we didn't check anyone at that time, if they were convicted previously or not – whoever said that they are ready to defend the country, signed up, received weapons and went to the East of our country." In an interview given to
VICE, he declared concerning his decision: "If it happened again, I would do the same thing". On 21 September 2014, he said that Russia doesn't admit that their soldiers are fighting in Ukraine. He also stated that Russia is the main aggressor, and that during the conflict, Ukraine had lost over 1,000 lives with hundreds missing. During the same
Facebook message, he compared the conflict to the butterflies, a metaphor to one of
Ray Bradbury's works. Turchynov was elected his party's faction leader on 27 November 2014. On 16 December 2014, President Poroshenko appointed Turchynov as Secretary of the
National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine. According to the social poll of the "Sofia" centre, in June 2017, only 0.9% of respondents said that they completely trust Turchynov, 9.5% trust him, 24.1% do not trust him, 57.4% do not trust him at all. On 1 November 2018, Turchynov was included in the Russian sanctions list in connection with Ukraine's unfriendly actions towards citizens and legal entities of the Russian Federation. On 11 December 2018, in response to the fact that 66 city councils and 12 regional councils had adopted the term "gender" instead of "sex", he published on his website an article he wrote called "
Neo-Marxism or a trip to the abyss". In this article he drew a parallel between Marxists and "neo-Marxists", and declared the latter "offe[r] society a struggle for the rights of the new "oppressed", assigning to them the role of emancipated women, homosexuals, lesbians, transgender people, and others like that." In his article he also criticized
LGBT activists and compared the "invented subjects" of
gender studies to the academic degrees of "
Scientific Communism" and "
Marxist-Leninist philosophy". He also called for the restoration of the term "sex" instead of the term "gender" in the national registration where the term "gender" was in use. On 17 May 2019, after the
Ukrainian elections, he resigned from his office as secretary of the
NSDC; his resignation was accepted on 19 May. In June 2020, Turchynov became head of the
2020 Ukrainian local elections headquarters of the party
European Solidarity. Turchynov stated he was "not interested in a parliamentary mandate or public positions, but to help the unification process and train quality staff of effective managers". ==Business activity==