Former Odesa mayor charged with negligence over handling of deadly floods
Editor's note: The story has been updated to include additional details.
The controversial former mayor of Odesa, Hennadiy Trukhanov, has been charged with negligence over his handling of a heavy rainstorm and flooding that devastated the coastal city late last month, the Prosecutor General's Office confirmed on Oct. 29.
Trukhanov and eight more officials were charged with negligence for failing to take adequate measures before and during the massive storm that claimed the lives of nine people, including a child.
"The cause was not a natural disaster, but official negligence," Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko said on Oct. 29. "(Trukhanov) held his position for years, knew the problems better than anyone else, but did nothing to solve them."
According to prosecutors, the former mayor neglected to maintain Odesa's engineering infrastructure.
Repeated flooding has affected the city's streets for years, yet Trukhanov failed to take actions required by his office to repair the stormwater and drainage systems in due time, the statement read.
During the floods on Sept. 30, he also did not properly warn residents about the danger of an emergency, the prosecutors said.
Law enforcement conducted searches at the residences of Trukhanov and his deputies. If convicted, the former Odesa mayor could face up to eight years in prison.
Two days of heavy rain caused widespread flooding, power outages, and downed trees across the region at the end of September, with reports of over 360 people rescued amid the storm.
In a recent interview with Ukrainska Pravda, Trukhanov said that he and the city council "did everything within their power" to deal with the flooding in Odesa.
Later in the day on Oct. 29, he said that the charges came as a "surprise."
"I'm not avoiding responsibility, but I have to be honest: this was a natural disaster, the scale of which exceeded the capabilities of any system," Trukhanov added.
The charges against Trukhanov follow a series of political developments over the past month in Odesa's Mayoral Office.
Trukhanov is a controversial figure in Ukraine due to his alleged Russian citizenship, as well as active charges against him stemming from a corruption case involving Odesa's Krayan factory building.
However, critics have also accused President Volodymyr Zelensky of turning a blind eye to the mayor's Russian citizenship before and trying to remove Trukhanov from office in order to monopolize power and eliminate local autonomy.
On Oct. 14, Zelensky issued a decree to strip Trukhanov of his Ukrainian citizenship, based on evidence that Trukhanov is a Russian citizen — a claim that he has denied.
As evidence, Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) published a purported photo of Trukhanov's active Russian passport, issued in 2015, a year after Russia launched its war against Ukraine and occupied the Crimean Peninsula.
Despite the photo, the Insider, a Russian investigative journalism outlet, claimed on Oct. 15 that while databases confirm that Trukhanov is a Russian citizen, the photo of the Russian passport published by the SBU is doctored.
When asked on Oct. 28 during a closed-door meeting with journalists, Zelensky said while Ukraine's State Border Guard Service has evidence of Trukhanov's Russian citizenship, the legitimacy of the SBU-published passport "doesn’t concern" him.
In an effort to replace Trukhanov, Zelensky appointed Serhii Lysak as head of the the newly formed Odesa Military Administration on Oct. 15. Zelensky's ally Ihor Koval, the secretary of the Odesa city council, a day later appointed himself as the city's acting mayor while Trukhanov was on vacation.
The procedure for depriving people of Ukrainian citizenship through presidential decrees without court decisions has also been lambasted as legally dubious or even illegal.
