Ivan Plachkov

Ivan Vasylyovych Plachkov (Ukrainian: Іван Васильович Плачков; born 23 November 1957) is a Ukrainian politician of Bulgarian descent. Plachkov was Ukraine's Minister of Energy in 1999 and again Minister of Fuel and Energy of Ukraine between 2005 and 2006.¹

Plachkov was born on 23 November 1957 in the village of Krynychne, which was then part of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union.² He was ethnically a Bessarabian Bulgarian.² After graduating from secondary school, he worked as a handyman for the PMK-99 of the Dunayvodbud trust in Izmail and as a school laboratory assistant.² In 1980, he graduated from the Odesa National Polytechnic University and qualified as a thermal power engineer.² Afterwords, he worked his way up until 1994 at the Kyiv CHPP-5 of the Kyivenergo Production Energy Association.² He then took on managerial positions at Kyivenergo until 1999. Then, he was appointed Minister of Energy briefly from February to December 1999.²

After returning to the private sector, he again became chairman of the board of Kyivenergo until he returned to politics in 2005.² In 2005 he became a Candidate of Technical Sciences.² He is also the president of Veles LLC, which produces wine in Odesa, and was from 2015 to 2017 Honorary President of the Association of Gas Producers.²

From 2005 to 2006 he again served as Minister of Fuel and Energy of Ukraine.² He was then appointed Governor of Odesa Oblast from 2006 to 2007, before becoming advisor to the President Viktor Yushchenko and Deputy Head of the State Administration of Affairs until 2010.²

In 2021, Plachkov made an analysis of Ukraine's energy sector and called for a review of the electricity market. He said the sector was poorly regulated and heavily reliant on cheap electricity from Russia and Belarus.³⁴