With Kyiv mayor Leonid Chernovetskiy away from his duties due to ill health or recuperation and a recent spate of changes in the personnel who run the city, the residents of Kyiv are no doubt busy trying to keep up with it all. Then there is the strange case of Denys Bass, one of Chernovetskiy’s right-hand men. He is said to have been dismissed and now on the run, despite receiving mysterious leg injuries recently. To cap that, at least five deputy mayors have been dismissed.
And on July 7 the country’s Security Service searched the office of the Kyiv council secretary and Chernovetskiy ally Oles Dovhiy. Although the next day he said the visit was not part of an investigation into the council´s activities, a week later he refuted rumors about the arrest of Kyiv city councilors. Land controller Oleksiy Yevlakh denied being probed by the Security Service. But residents of the capital must be asking themselves: who is running the place? The city is like a rudderless ship. One thing is clear: dodgy land deals are at the heart of the investigation.
Dovhiy himself survived the question of his dismissal last week, as there were not enough votes in the Kyiv council to put the issue on the agenda.  At the end of June the then Housing and Utilities Minister Oleksandr Popov was appointed first deputy head of the Kyiv city administration so as to bring order to affairs. He is said to be a good manager and will bring in his own team to squeeze Chernovetskiy’s role to politics and away from the day-to-day running of the city. But the Party of Regions and its coalition partners are in no rush to discard the current mayor when he can be kept on a short leash.  Indeed, the Ukrainian Parliament ruled on July 10 that there will be no Kyiv mayoral election on October 31, the date when most of the country’s mayors and local councils will be elected. Local elections throughout Ukraine were scheduled for the end of May, having failed to take place, in speaker Lytvyn’s words, due to lack of funds. While Chernovetskiy was re-elected at an unscheduled mayoral election in 2008. This means that any possible return to big time politics in the guise of Kyiv mayor is ruled out for chief oppositionist Yulia Tymoshenko. It will be difficult for her to oppose this quiet and anti-democratic revolution in the capital as the Party of Regions builds its presence there.

No charity
Two decades after the world´s most serious nuclear accident, the towns near the Chernobyl plant remain semi-abandoned. Work on a new ´safe confinement structure´ has begun to halt further contamination. However, the child victims of the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster are being denied charity holidays in Britain by immigration officials. Children looking forward to a month´s recuperation away from nuclear contamination are having their holiday plans ruined by the UK Border Agency, which denies them visas, sometimes the night before they are due to travel. Since the disaster in 1986, British charities have helped thousands of young people from affected areas in Ukraine and Belarus to have holidays with British families. Now those charities say their work is becoming impossible. Indeed, the denial of visas to Ukrainian children was highlighted by a popular local tabloid last week. It said that children wanting to visit the UK this summer are being denied visas en masse. Travel industry managers say that mass refusals have never happened before and that the practice became commonplace this year. The paper was told that the UKBA does not comment on individual visa cases, though child safety may be an issue. Children in Ukraine continue to be at greater risk of terminal illnesses because of the contaminated environment they are exposed to. A month in Britain, where they can breathe cleaner air and build up strength, can greatly improve life expectancy. Children and their parents who have set their hearts on going to the UK should at least be given a valid and, hopefully genuine, reason for denial. That small piece of charity would at least be just and ease some of the pain.