Mustafa Naeem

Mustafa Masi Nayyem (Ukrainian: Мустафа Найєм, Pashto: مصطفی نعیم; born June 28, 1981) is an Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, MP, lecturer at the Kyiv School of Economics, and public figure who was influential in sparking the Euromaidan in Ukraine. Since January 2023 Nayyem had been the head of the State Agency for Restoration and Infrastructure Development. He resigned (and was officially dismissed) in June 2024. Prior to this he was Deputy Minister of Infrastructure appointed in August 2021. Formerly, before his bureaucratic career Nayyem was a reporter for the newspaper Kommersant Ukraine, the TVi channel, and the online newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda. He also participates in Ukrainian journalists' anti-censorship movement, "Stop the censorship!" (Ukrainian: Стоп цензурі!, Stop tsenzuri!), and Hromadske.TV. In the parliamentary elections he was elected to the Ukrainian parliament on the list of Petro Poroshenko Bloc. Nayyem did not take part in the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election. Nayyem was born in Kabul in 1981 and lived in an elite district near the Tajbeg Palace. In 1984, ten days after his younger brother Masi Nayyem was born, their mother died. He has stated that he is a Pashtun, a "Muslim by birth", and his native tongue is Dari. In Afghanistan, his father, Muhammad Naim (Ukrainian: Мухаммад Наїм), had been Minister of Education and was responsible for the construction of educational facilities before the USSR invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. After the Soviet invasion, his father did not want to work for the Soviets and quit his post. In 1987 and because of the destruction of the ongoing Soviet Union's War in Afghanistan, his father went to Moscow to study and met Ukrainian Valentina Kolechko whom he later married in early 1989. Mustafa Nayyem became fluent in Russian and Ukrainian after he moved with his father to Moscow in August 1989 living near the Nakhimovsky Prospekt metro station and later to Kyiv in 1990 attending 61st school near the Lukyanivsky market. Nayyem graduated from the Technical Lyceum in Kyiv in 1998, and the Aerospace Systems Department of Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in 2004. He speaks fluent Ukrainian, Pashto, Russian, and English. He and Anastasia Ivanova who is from Lviv and was a photographer for Kommersant-Ukraine (Ukrainian: Коммерсантъ Украина), have a son, Mark-Mikhei (born 13 January 2008), and both mother and son are Jewish.