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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The party always makes the decision: even the demands of thousands of citizens will not force it to withdraw a council member.
In six years of the Kyiv City Council’s work 23 deputies’ powers were terminated early. Voters did not recall any of them; parties recalled three. Even if Kyiv residents collect signatures, the final decision is made by the party: that is how the mechanism for recalling local deputies works. This is stated in a study by the civic initiative Holka.
Of the 23 deputies who left the council, five resigned their mandates early in the term, 12 resigned of their own accord, and three more died or were killed. Among them are Oleksandr Omelchenko, who died from complications after COVID-19, OPZZh deputy Serhiy Mamoyan, who died in a car accident, and Serhiy Ilnytskyi from European Solidarity, who died defending Ukraine.
Parties decided to recall deputies in four cases. Two cases were related to corruption scandals. Servant of the People recalled Vladyslav Trubitsyn after he traveled abroad during a corruption investigation. UDAR decided to recall land commission chair Mykhailo Terentyev after NABU’s “Clean City” operation. However, Terentyev kept his mandate thanks to a court injunction in support of his lawsuit. To remove him from the position of commission chair, a court ruling is not required, but the Kyiv City Council has not made a decision to dismiss him for over a year.
The other two recalls were not related to corruption scandals. Batkivshchyna got rid of Mykhailo Kovalchuk after his statement that mobilization supposedly has no legal force. European Solidarity recalled Volodymyr Levin, officially citing a “violation of the faction’s jointly developed position.”
By law, citizens can initiate the recall of a deputy. For this in Kyiv, according to Holka, about 4 thousand signatures must be collected. However, the final decision is still made by the party. “We have a paradoxical situation: Kyiv residents elect deputies, but in fact cannot directly influence them to protect the capital’s interests,” said Holka civic initiative head Iryna Fedoriv. She proposes changing the rules: “The community should have the right to independently recall its representatives without party permission, but at the same time be able to block party decisions to recall deputies it trusts.”
Holka also criticizes the Electoral Code that MPs adopted on the eve of the local elections. In elections with open lists, competition was supposed to take place on two levels: between parties for voters’ votes and within parties over which candidates receive mandates. The second level did not work. To move up the list thanks to personal votes, a candidate in Kyiv had to gain 25% of the electoral quota, almost 1200 votes. Only a few managed this. If the threshold had been 5%, about 240 votes would have sufficed, and voters would really determine the order on the list. Instead, candidates’ positions were set by party leadership, which already before the elections knew which candidates would almost certainly receive mandates.
Parties remember recalls mostly when a scandal erupts around a deputy. In February 2022, Vladyslav Trubitsyn was detained while receiving a bribe: according to the investigation, he and accomplices took money for winning tenders to place kiosks in three Kyiv districts. The party then reported that the deputy himself suspended his membership during the investigation.
Three years later, businessman Denys Komarnytskyi’s case implicated the chair of the Kyiv City Council’s land commission. Court materials indicate the investigation believes Komarnytskyi involved in the land scheme the deputy Mykhailo Terentyev and deputy Olena Marchenko, under which a group of people obtained rights to attractive plots.
About the schemes by which the Kyiv City Council renewed land leases and transferred plots for development, the ZN.UA article “From toilet schemes to a Shanghai-style master plan. By what schemes did Kyiv authorities operate for five years?” features urban planning expert and Holka analyst Heorhiy Mohylnyi.
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