Odesa Rallies Without Coordination for Month - Organizer Speaks Out

The Odesa Regional Military Administration did not coordinate the "Honor 9:00" rallies in Odesa for a month.

Anastasia Lukashuk, the organizer of these events in Odesa, told Intent.Insight live on air.

According to her, when these actions began in the winter of 2024, they did not know at first that they needed to be coordinated with the OVA and held the first three actions simply by informing the mayor's office about the action. They were held twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday.

"We didn't stop traffic with the police, we just stood on the sidewalk. We held the rally on Wednesday, and on Thursday we received a letter from the mayor's office saying that they could not approve the rally without the approval of the DIA. We applied to the DIA for approval and they did not answer us for more than a month and did not approve the action, so we did not hold it," she noted.

The action consists in stopping all vehicles and pedestrians at 9:00 a.m. during the all-Ukrainian minute of silence to honor those killed in the war with Russia with a minute of silence. In Odesa, patrol police help to stop traffic at the locations of the action.

According to Anastasia Lukashuk, she has talked to organizers of such events in other cities and only in Odesa has such a problem arisen.

"I talked to other coordinators and it turned out that Odesa is the only city where such problems arise. In other cities, they just write to the mayor's office and that's it. And here we have to go to the mayor's office and to them. We waited and waited, and then decided that if they did not respond to us electronically, we should go directly to them and remind them of ourselves, and now this problem is gone," she said.

According toOksana Shubinok, the coordinator of the rallies , when she joined the problem, she found out that the city council, the DIA, and the police did not even communicate with each other to resolve these issues. Therefore, the organizers of the actions physically visited the DIA, the mayor's office, and the police to explain what the actions were and why they were being held.

Кирило Бойко