Valeriy Soldatenko is a Ukrainian historian and professor, member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine since 2006. Soldatenko was a member of Communist Party of Ukraine, which he joined in 1969. In 2014, Soldatenko was appointed by then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, a decision which proved controversial due to Soldatenko's support for the Soviet Union and denial of the Holodomor as a genocide. After the Ukrainian Revolution, Soldatenko was forced to resign from his post, and since then, he has been a chief researcher at the I. F. Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnonational Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
