Deputies of Kherson City Council withdrew from community affairs during the third year of their term of office

The results of monitoring the activities of local council members as part of the all-Ukrainian public campaign "Certification of Local Council Members" were presented to the Kherson community during an online roundtable. Representatives of civil society organizations, journalists, and deputies took part in the event. The discussion focused on the situation surrounding the work of Kherson City Council deputies in 2023-2024.

According to the campaign experts, the situation in Kherson city territorial community is fundamentally different from the situation in other communities, as the Kherson City Council has not held its plenary sessions since February 2022. In addition, some of the Kherson deputies have sided with the enemy: so far, two deputies have received court sentences for collaboration. Law enforcement agencies are investigating several other deputies. Some of the deputies left Kherson for other cities in the country and abroad. Four deputies are in the ranks of the Ukrainian Defense Forces. Only a small number of mandate holders remain in the regional center. A city military administration has been established in Kherson, with the head of the administration having the powers of the city council, mayor and executive committee.

According to Dementiy Bilyi, a board member of the Black Sea Center for Political and Social Studies, since the second half of 2023, there has been a gradual withdrawal of deputies from active participation in community governance in the field of representing and protecting the interests of voters, and controlling the work of executive bodies. They are gradually being removed from working in collective advisory and consultative bodies, and information about their activities on official media resources is sharply reduced. For example, out of twenty-one working commissions approved by the Chief of the Military Administration in 2023 and 2024, only five commissions had MPs represented. For the most part, their presence can be explained by the positions that these MPs simultaneously hold in executive bodies.

In 2023-2024, the number of news reports on the work of local deputies in the official Telegram channel "Kherson City Military Administration - Kherson City Council" decreased twelvefold compared to 2022 and amounted to only two reports per year. It is worth noting that this telegram channel publishes 20-30 news messages daily.

Under these conditions, the MPs themselves do not fulfill the powers they have left. For example, only one MP, Oksana Pohomiy, publicly reported on her Facebook page about her parliamentary activities and the activities of her faction. For obvious security reasons, MPs do not conduct offline reception of voters. But voters also do not have the opportunity to make an appointment with MPs online.

The level of information and communication with voters through social media has deteriorated. While before the war, all members of the Kherson City Council had their own Facebook page and only one deputy posted it in the "friends only" mode, now eight deputies either post all or so-called "political" materials for friends only. While in 2022, 28 MPs regularly maintained their pages, in 2024, there were already 18 MPs who maintain them in the mode of at least one publication per month. In the first year of the full-scale war, 17 MPs regularly reported primarily on their civic activities, community affairs, and their own volunteer initiatives. In the second year, 12 MPs did so: Vitaliy Belobrov, Viacheslav Bilkovsky, Andriy Kalyta, Oleksandr Lozhychev, Andriy Medvedev, Ihor Osaulenko, Oksana Pohomiy, Dmytro Piddubnyi, Yuriy Poputko, Andriy Sydorenko, Yuriy Stelmashenko, and Viktor Sukhokobylin.

Since August 2023, the process of MPs terminating their powers has intensified. Seventeen MPs out of fifty-four, or 31%, have had their powers terminated: five MPs from the OPFL, four MPs from Ihor Kolikhayev ' s We Live Here party, two MPs each from the Servant of the People, European Solidarity, and Volodymyr Saldo Bloc. The powers of two more MPs from the Volodymyr Saldo Bloc were terminated after the court verdict was announced.

As in the previous year, the main form of activity of the deputies remains fundraising and volunteering.

During the discussion of the monitoring results, Mykola Homanyuk, head of the Kherson regional branch of the Sociological Association of Ukraine, noted the low level of trust of Kherson residents in the military administration, according to the Association's research. In his opinion, this is due to the concentration of powers of local governments in the military administration.

Oleh Dyadyun, a member of the Beryslav District Council of several convocations, noted that this situation is typical for other communities in Kherson region and believes that some deputies have discredited themselves by cooperating with the enemy during the occupation and that it is necessary to reboot the deputy corps by dissolving it.

Political observer Volodymyr Molchanov believes that it is necessary to change the rules for selecting deputies and introduce a majority system in local elections, as one of the reasons for the suspension of deputies in small communities in the region, in his opinion, is that the elected deputies do not live directly in the communities and were elected on the lists of political parties.

During the discussion, everyone agreed with the recommendations of the experts of the Black Sea Center for Political and Social Studies, who monitored deputy activities in Kherson as part of the "Certification of Local Council Deputies" campaign, that both military administrations and deputies need to take measures to return deputies to fulfill their powers in the following areas: representing and protecting the interests of the territorial community and individual voters; exercising control over the work of executive bodies; receiving voters; and

The roundtable discussion is available for viewing here.