Ukrainian city prepares for life after the war

Dan Peleschuk, Reuters

For the mayor of the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, wartime crises like water and power outages and a crumbling local economy are short-term obstacles to a long-term plan.

Oleksandr Sienkevych believes that reforms and accountability, including overhauling how public firms are run, are critical to the Black Sea port’s future as Ukraine begins its long and potentially difficult path to the European Union.

“We’re doing this for our reputation ... to make it transparent,” two-term mayor Sienkevych told Reuters in a recent interview in Mykolaiv, a regional capital of around 400,000 people.

Just 40 miles from the front line, the city is in a dire situation. It has been without clean tap water for more than two years after Russian forces destroyed important infrastructure.

Authorities have set up distribution stations throughout the city providing filtered drinking water and have also managed to pump non-potable water into pipes, though its uses are limited.

“You shouldn’t even wash your dishes with it,” said 75-year-old Liubov Ivanovna, as she moved around water containers in her courtyard one recent morning.

Beyond the water crisis, local schools have been in online-only mode for four years. The city budget lost around half of its revenue because of the war, and the port has been closed since February 2022. The streets, like others across Ukraine, are plunged into darkness daily after Russian airstrikes that wrought havoc on Ukraine’s energy system.

Last Friday, three people including a child were killed in a Russian missile strike on an apartment building. Sienkevych, a 42-year-old former entrepreneur first elected in 2015, describes efforts to overhaul the administration of the city as part of a “fantasy” of a brighter future. His team is conducting internationally supervised “integrity assessments” of municipal utilities firms, with the goal of introducing corporate-style governance to boost accountability, said Yuliia Mincheva, an adviser to Sienkevych. The water company was first in line.

Officials have also developed a system to publicly catalogue international financial aid to the city, and Mykolaiv recently became the first Ukrainian city to publish procurement data in a machine-readable format, making it easier to analyse.

Ukraine’s bid for membership of the EU, which formally launched talks with Kyiv last month, means it must streamline a clunky bureaucracy and show progress in reforms. Mincheva said officials were seizing the opportunity to lay early foundations for responsible governance. She added that Mykolaiv’s vulnerability means it must work harder to earn the trust of donors and investors who will be crucial to its future.

“You need to do more, to go the extra mile, to become not the first place to invest, but at least the second or third,” Mincheva said. Sienkevych acknowledged that such reforms receive little attention from disgruntled residents as the 29-month-old war grinds on. The water crisis in particular has focused residents’ anger on city hall, even though it can only be fully fixed by the central government in Kyiv, he said.

He blamed a deep-seated Soviet mentality of suspicion of authorities that had been exacerbated by what he said was Russian propaganda casting Ukrainian authorities as corrupt.

“They think that everyone forgot about them,” Sienkevych said.

The discontent was apparent at water stations around Mykolaiv, where young and old lined up in scorching sunshine to haul away their daily supplies.

“I just don’t believe that it’s impossible to fix,” said pensioner Valeriy, 68, while filling up several of the 30 or so bottles he keeps at home to collect water. Cities across Ukraine are struggling with the prospect of rebuilding while war is raging, with Russia bearing down on multiple parts of the 1,000-km (620-mile) front line and also attacking the energy system before winter. As a result, said Josh Rudolph of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Kyiv’s international partners should begin shifting some of their focus from reconstruction to helping build Ukraine’s resilience. But local leaders must still strike a balance of addressing both, he added. “A mayor like Sienkevych needs to do it all at once,” he said. “He does not have the luxury of focusing on one (problem) now, and then the other later.”