Alexey Serko was appointed State Secretary - Deputy Head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, and Nikolai Grechushkin became another deputy minister, reports . the department's press service

Until recently, Serko worked as a senior assistant to Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika on special assignments. Until November 2011, Serko was first deputy and then first deputy chief of staff of the Federation Council. He came to the Ministry of Emergency Situations to replace former State Secretary Oleg Bazhenov.

Until April 2014, Major General Grechushkin headed the Department of Logistics and Armaments of the Ministry of Emergency Situations. Now in the ministry he will replace Deputy Minister Sergei Kadadov.

In the announcement of the appointment of two new deputy ministers of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, he refers to presidential decree No. 450 of July 24, 2018. However, at the time of publication, this document is not available either on the Kremlin website or on the official legal information disclosure portal.

In May, Yevgeny Zinichev, deputy director of the FSB and former aide-de-camp to President Vladimir Putin, became the new minister for emergency situations. Deputy head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations with 12 years of experience Alexander Chupriyan was promoted to first deputy minister. The task of the new minister will be to resolve personnel issues, and Chupriyan will be in charge of the operational management of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, said Vedomosti’s source in the Ministry of Defense.

Now the head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations has six deputies: one first deputy minister, a state secretary - a deputy minister and four deputy ministers.

The new leadership of the Ministry of Emergency Situations began reform, the Kommersant newspaper wrote. Chupriyan announced at a meeting on May 25 that the optimization of the department’s expenses by reducing employees was over (according to the newspaper, 59,800 people have been fired from the Ministry of Emergency Situations since 2015). Chupriyan said at the meeting that he was “shocked by the number of vacancies and staffing shortages,” and ordered that proposals for staffing the units of the Ministry of Emergency Situations system be submitted as soon as possible.

Chaika’s assistant and the department’s former chief logistics officer became the new deputy head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations