He was born on 27 July 1960 in the town of Bekdash, on the Caspian coast in the Turkmen SSR, in the Soviet Union. In 1982 Kunitsyn graduated as a construction engineer-technologist from the
Dnipropetrovsk
Dnipro, previously called Dnipropetrovsk from 1926 until May 2016, is Ukraine's fourth-largest city, with about one million inhabitants. It is located in the eastern part of Ukraine, southeast of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on the Dnieper Rive ...
Construction Engineering Institute in Simferopol. After the institute he worked for "Perekop Chemical Construction" ( Krasnoperekopsk) followed by the obligatory service in the army and serving over a year in Afghanistan.
After the army, for a short period in 1985 Kunitsyn worked as an engineer-technologist at "Crimea Canal Construction" followed by the appointment as a chief engineer at the Krasnoperekopsk Plant of reinforced concrete where he worked until 1989. In 1989–1990 he worked as an instructor at the ideological department of the Krasnoperekopsk city committee of the
Communist Party of Ukraine
The Communist Party of Ukraine, Abbreviation: KPU, from Ukrainian and Russian "" is a banned political party in Ukraine. It was founded in 1993 as the successor to the Soviet-era Communist Party of Ukraine which was banned in 1991 (accord ...
M.E. Sharpe
M. E. Sharpe, Inc., an academic publisher, was founded by Myron Sharpe in 1958 with the original purpose of publishing translations from Russian in the social sciences and humanities. These translations were published in a series of journals, the ...
, 1998, (page 44)
In 2008, as a Chairman of Sevastopol City State Administration, Kunitsyn joined the political party United Centre. In 2012 Kunitsyn was reelected to the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) as a member of the UDAR party.
On 27 February 2014 a decree of the acting President, Oleksandr Turchynov, appointed him Permanent Representative of the President in Crimea. On 24 March 2014 Kunitsyn said that "because of the toothless government" he had decided to resign from this post and on 26 March Turchinov signed a decree to dismiss him with the phrase "for the improper performance of official duties."
President Petro Poroshenko appointed Kunitsyn as his adviser on 25 June 2014.
Since December 2014 Kunitsyn is a member of the Ukrainian parliament as an independent politician for Petro Poroshenko Bloc, he was number 68 of the national party list of this political party in the
2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election
Snap elections to the Verkhovna Rada took place on 26 October 2014.
Petro Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine, had pressed for early parliamentary elections since his victory in the presidential election in May.
Personal life
Sehiy Kunitsyn has married in 1982. He has two children daughter Natalia (1986) and son Oleksiy (1991).