After the tragic events in Odesa on September 30, when negligence by emergency services and local authorities took ten lives, including a child, society expected “official conclusions” from the central government, particularly regarding the leadership of the Interior Ministry and the State Emergency Service. However, no one could have imagined that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would make a surprise move and strip Odesa’s mayor Hennadii Trukhanov of Ukrainian citizenship.
The operation was carried out lightning-fast, just as the limiting of powers of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office—a practice that is already becoming Bankova’s trademark in centralizing authority. But this time it was more thought-through. To appoint Serhii Lysak, Brigadier General of the SSU and Head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration, to the position of head of Odesa’s city military administration, the authorities relied on public opinion as a political tool. In Odesa, exhausted by corruption (the High Anti-Corruption Court is hearing several cases in which mayor Trukhanov is implicated. — The author’s note here and below — O.S.), an active civic environment has long formed that fights not only for decommunization but also for removing Trukhanov from power.
The idea of transferring city governance to a military administration is not new. Therefore, it is quite logical that, this time, the interests of civil society and the Presidential Office aligned. First, the well-known Odesa activist Serhii Sternenko stated that Trukhanov possessed a Russian passport. Shortly after, a petition was submitted by serviceman Myroslav Otkovych. Then, the SSU “suddenly” retrieved Trukhanov’s Russian passport from the archives—a document that had been gathering dust for eleven years—and dramatically placed it on President Zelenskyy’s desk.
The move was so conspicuous that investigative journalist Christo Grozev reported on it. According to him, the passport on the basis of which President Zelenskyy stripped the Odesa mayor of Ukrainian citizenship—the Russian international passport issued in 2015—is “demonstrably a fake” and was likely created as part of a Russian information operation targeting the Odesa mayor. Incredible!
The Insider, the outlet Grozev cooperates with, gives specifics: indeed, two passports in the name of Trukhanov are in Russian databases, but one was lost and the other annulled by a Moscow region court decision in 2017. The media argues that the copy of the passport published by the SSU is not factually accurate: that number belongs to a Russian woman named Tatyana, and in the document attributed to Trukhanov his name is recorded incorrectly. In addition, according to border service data, since 2014 Trukhanov has not visited Russia and does not have a valid Russian international passport.
Whether that is true or not will be decided by a court, to which Trukhanov will most likely appeal. And it seems it will not be a Ukrainian court but the European Court of Human Rights. The point, however, is that no one at the Presidential Office intended to wait for any judicial decision. The process of seizing power in Odesa initiated by the SSU is already underway.
The main question now is: what will happen to the authorities in Odesa? Who will actually run the strategically important city and its budget—Serhii Lysak, the newly appointed head of the city military administration, Oleh Kiper, head of the regional military administration and former Kyiv prosecutor, or the city council secretary, as provided by law?
Can a person without a passport be a mayor?
Let us say it right away: the answer is yes. And for quite a long time. Of course, the deprivation of Ukrainian citizenship gives grounds for the termination of a mayor’s powers, but by law this fact must be taken into account—i.e., voted on—by the city council, and that is by no means a certain prospect. Moreover, even if half of council members were to vote for it, the decision must be signed by… mayor Trukhanov. If he does not sign it, he can veto it (he has the right), and to override that veto you need a two-thirds majority. Even if the Office of the Prosecutor General opens criminal cases (foolishness comes easy) against all 64 Odesa council members, one would still have to wait for a positive vote till kingdom come or the collapse of Russia.
Before all these procedures started, Hennadii Trukhanov quite predictably said he would challenge the president’s decree in court. Having already announced this, he can trigger the suspension of the decree pending the resolution of the case.
Are there grounds for the court to annul this decree? It seems there are. First, back in 2017 the SSU was digging up dirt on Trukhanov (when he was still an ardent supporter of Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions) over his Russian passport but found nothing. Second, Trukhanov is not someone who sits and waits for a lightning to strike. In 2019, he did indeed appeal to the Sergiyevo-Posadsky City Court of the Moscow Region, demanding that the decision to issue the passport and the Russian passport itself be declared unlawful (I use a quote from a scan in the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper since the court website is unavailable).
The court decision explicitly states that “the presence of a Russian passport violates the rights and legitimate interests of H.L. Trukhanov as a citizen of Ukraine holding the office of mayor of Odesa,” and fully satisfies his claims.
To my mind, these have materials already shattered the foundation of President Zelensky’s decree to pieces even before Grozev’s publication. Apparently, the Presidential Office never reads newspapers. They truly seem to believe that kings can do as they please.
Why were military administrations created?
The president’s first decree on renaming of regional state administrations (RSAs) into regional military administrations (RMAs) after the start of the full-scale invasion brings to mind Prosper Mérimée’s story about a chicken baptize into a carp: RSAs automatically “acquired the status” of RMAs, with the heads of the former “becoming” heads of the latter. The president retained full authority to appoint and dismiss heads of RMAs, as was the case before with RSAs.
One snag popped up in the capital: the Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA) was supposed to dissolve and become the Kyiv City Military Administration (KCMA). However, by law and the Constitutional Court’s decision, the KCSA also enjoys the status of the executive body of the Kyiv City Council. The Presidential Office did not take this circumstance into account when preparing the relevant decree; the dismissal of Vitali Klitschko from the post of head of the KCMA, which occurred a couple of months after his appointment, only highlighted and cemented his status as city mayor and the status of KCSA. We have repeatedly written about the labyrinths of the power system in the capital that hamper the life of a city suffering constant missile attacks from Russia.
Regarding military administrations in local communities, the law prescribes that they are to be created where local self-government bodies do not function or in frontline territories, filling gaps in local authority or strengthening it. In addition, military administrations represent Ukrainian authority in communities whose territories are temporarily occupied. Most city military administrations have been formed in Kherson, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Donetsk regions; they are beyond reproach. However, there are odd exceptions. For example, city military administrations exist in Sumy, Netishyn in Khmelnytskyi region, Chernihiv, Snihurivka in Mykolaiv region, Varash in Rivne region and in Kyiv. In all these cities, military administrations work in parallel with city councils and mayors. The pressing need for their introduction is unclear.
However, the Chernihiv case is instructive. There, after a casual move by the National Agency on Corruption Prevention and an unlawful court decision, mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko was suspended. And although the parliament never voted to transfer powers to the appointed head of the city’s military administration, the secretary, with the help of those very court rulings, gradually lost part of his powers, including control over the budget, and later even the post itself. Thus, a creeping algorithm for seizing power in a city has already been tested in practice.
There are other peculiarities: in Snihurivka, the same person holds the office of city mayor, with his own deputies, and also the post of head of the city military administration (CMA), with different deputies; yet in both capacities, he calls himself the chief of the military administration. A kind of two-faced Janus or a Siamese twin in reverse: one head for two bodies.
What do these city military administrations actually do in terms of defending the city? After all, they were supposed to be created precisely for that. Without cherry-picking, I visited the website to see what the CMA does in, for example, Netishyn. Mostly it issues congratulations to its citizens—for Defenders Day, All-Ukrainian Library Day, Preschool Day, Out-of-School Day, Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Day, Entrepreneur’s Day, and what not. But what I couldn’t find on the website is who’s doing the congratulating: there is no information on who the head of the CMA is… In short, the unknown character in Netishyn has nothing to do.
Truth be told, when the 2023 appointment was made one SSU officer’s name surfaced, but how the powers will be divided between the Netishyn mayor elected by the townspeople and the president-appointed head of the city military administration remains unclear. Serhii Tiurin, Deputy Head of Khmelnytskyi RMA, merely speculated: “I think the president was guided by security and defense issues of the Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plant.” (Isn’t air defense supposed to handle that?) He also explained: “Coordination meetings are currently taking place at the regional administration with Netishyn’s mayor Oleksandr Supruniuk and the new head of the Netishyn city military administration, Hryhorii Olendro.”
Likely, in other cities where local self-government bodies operate the situation is similar, which is logical: if some bodies are working, the others idle.
Lysak or Kiper?
Celebrated by Babel, Utyosov, Zhvanetsky and many others as the pearl by the sea, the city of bandits, contraband and big money (that description is currently relevant), Odesa has always been a tempting morsel for all sorts of adventurers, swindlers and schemers of every era and every ruler. That is why, scarcely had the ink dried on the presidential decree about the civic “castration” of Hennadii Trukhanov, a new decree by Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared on the information horizon—this time, appointing the former chief SSU officer of Dnipropetrovsk region and later head of the Dnipropetrovsk RMA, Serhii Lysak, as head of Odesa’s CMA. As Shakespeare wrote, “A little month, or ere those shoes were old with which she followed my poor father’s body…” In Odesa they might put it differently: they had barely carried the corpse out of the flat before introducing the widow to the next one.
It is known that Serhii Lysak is a brigadier general; he received the rank on the same day as Vasyl Maliuk, has combat experience and numerous combat awards and kept his name out of major scandals in his previous position. It is clear that his candidacy was coordinated with both Vasyl Maliuk and the head of Odesa RMA, Oleh Kiper, who will formally be Lysak’s direct superior. In Oleh Kiper’s biography (besides that he is Yermak’s man and for a long time remained candidate No. 1 for the post of Prosecutor General, and today effectively continues to control the capital’s prosecutor’s office) there are many murky spots: he served under Viktor Yanukovych under the direction of the well-known interiors designer Viktor Pshonka, was lustrated but reinstated by court and served as prosecutor of Kyiv under Iryna Venediktova. Yet as the master of Odesa region, he went as far as establishing customs rules for the region and its ports that were separate from the rest of the country. Some 85 percent of the nation’s agricultural exports pass through Odesa.
It is no secret that Kiper’s wife Iryna had Russian citizenship even during the war (what do you know!), and in 2022–2023 became the owner of two apartments in Kyiv and four real-estate objects in… the Bukovel ski resort. In addition, Trukhanov recently stated that she still holds a Russian passport and pays taxes in Russia, asking the SSU to look into the case. It is indeed interesting where the SSU was looking when Kiper was gaining access to state secrets.
Thus, the so-called “management team” in Odesa and the surrounding area remains as interesting and entertaining as ever, and we will likely see more tragicomic courtroom and council performances ahead. Still, many information sources have already referred to Lysak, rather than Kiper, as the new master of Odesa.
As our interlocutors claim, Serhii Lysak is indeed a strong leader. In every sense of the word. He effectively subordinated Dnipro to himself and has a direct line to the Presidential Office. He communicates well with Yermak’s imfamous deputy Oleh Tatarov and was even promised the post of deputy head of the SSU. But now he has suddenly found himself in Odesa. Why this happened can only be guessed. Yet it is obvious that he and Kiper will be cramped there together: both are ambitious and similar in style and temperament.
It is possible that Lysak was appointed precisely to seize control of the city. After all, it is not enough merely to remove Trukhanov; one must take Odesa under control. (Dealing with the networks of Oleksandr Angert and Borys Kaufman and co. is not for weaklings and certainly not for “second-stringers.”) Had they put someone from Kiper’s people there, he simply would not have coped. What was needed was a strong figure capable of quickly imposing order, pulling the system together, and then, perhaps, moving on to work in the SSU.
Nevertheless, Kiper, it seems, is not delighted with such an appointment. Although this is only conjecture. They say it was Kiper who actively promoted the question of removing Trukhanov. Rumor has it that Zelenskyy feared that on the eve of the elections Trukhanov could play “on Zaluzhnyi’s side,” so he decided to act swiftly. Hence the urgency—and the appearance of a dubious “piece of evidence” from the SSU.
The king syndrome
This is not the first time the Presidential Office has settled scores with political opponents through forgeries or fabricated materials. Something similar has happened before. Recall how sanctions were applied against Petro Poroshenko (who is facing credible accusations in two criminal cases being investigated by the State Bureau of Investigation and NABU) without any real grounds, solely on the basis of financial monitoring. Then the SSU refused to endorse the materials, but this time, conversely, it fulfilled the presidential team’s political order. And in both cases one thing is apparent: behind these moves stands the Presidential Office, which is getting rid of competitors, be they in politics or business.
Finally, although supporters of Volodymyr Zelenskyy claim that calling the deprivation of Hennadii Trukhanov’s citizenship “an attack on local self-government” is laughable, the very act of removing a sitting mayor from office—if it happens—would prove exactly that. The introduction of a city military administration in a city where the mayor is still in office—and where, if he is removed, his duties should legally be carried out by the city council secretary—is nothing short of establishing an autocratic system of rule in the country.
However, events are unfolding faster than this article is written: citing Article 42 of the Law “On Local Self-Government,” the secretary of the Odesa city council, Ihor Koval, independently issued an order stating that he assumes the duties of the mayor of Odesa. And what about the city council vote, gentlemen? As we already clarified, according to part 11 of Article 79 of the Law “On Local Self-Government in Ukraine,” the council must take into account and vote (or not) on the removal of Trukhanov from office. How will Trukhanov respond to that? Whose side will the council members take? Who will recognize that this order was issued with an abuse of powers? Clearly, we have an example of how one lie (about the passport) breeds an entire avalanche of new lies and misunderstandings. Will the city council in Odesa continue to exist? Who will run the city’s affairs? All these questions remain unanswered…
There is one more interesting point. The Association of Ukrainian Cities has not issued a single statement in defense of the mayor of Odesa, whose city is a member of the association. What does the silence of the AUC and its head, Kyiv mayor Vitalii Klitschko, mean? That is an open question. Which, of course, is of little concern to the Presidential Office, whose policy after appointing Tymur Tkachenko as head of the KCMA is aimed gradually removing Klitschko from power.
Against the backdrop of the corruption scandal stemming from NABU’s investigation after Operation Clean City and the presidential party’s already prepared draft decision on removing Klitschko from power, there is every likelihood that Odesa is a dress rehearsal before Kyiv. Admittedly, things will be more complicated in the capital. If not with public opinion, then certainly with votes in the Kyiv City Council. And much will depend on the position of the European Solidarity faction, which we have already covered in detail.
Meanwhile, usually harsh toward any pressure from the president on local self-government, Dnipro’s mayor Borys Filatov unexpectedly changed his tune. In his post, he effectively supported Lysak’s appointment: “…It was enough for us to meet once a week (or two) for all the big metropolis issues to be resolved without unnecessary discussions and publicity. Thank you, Serhii, for almost two and a half years you were by our side. You can always count on me. Thanks to your team. Normal, decent and honest people. With whom one could argue, sort things out, even quarrel—but never expect a knife in the back. Finally, it pains me today to read in social networks the curses of Odesa residents (or… their bots) directed at Serhii Lysak. Because he certainly does not deserve that now.”
…By and large, the “deprivation of citizenship” suit can be tailored for anyone. If you truly want justice for the city, cancel the Lozovyi amendments and let the High Anti-Corruption Court hear the cases on the Kraiany plant and the mayor’s business partner Volodymyr Halanternyk (Trukhanov is involved in both), instead of dangling on the hook of lawyers who delay top corruption cases for a political maneuver. But no! If we cannot live and govern by law, we will craft forgeries, confuse Dagestan with Uzbekistan (the case of NABU detective Ruslan Magamedrasulov) and present forged passports as arguments. (This is a disgrace in front of the whole world!) Of course, for an autocrat it is easier to crack down on Kolomoiskyi, Korban and Trukhanov than to create conditions where law stands above power. That is what the war is really about. In Odesa and in other cities there is much to sort out. And you, autocrats, hire “janissaries” instead: recently the SSU staff was increased by 10,000.
Have you tried recruiting smart and professional people?