show<\/a>\u00a0that he had one \u2013 and used it to register offshore companies.<\/p>\nTwo days after losing his Ukrainian citizenship, Trukhanov was fired as part of what some observers call a turf war between central and regional authorities caused by the provisions of\u00a0martial law, conflicting jurisdictions and Kyiv\u2019s push to rein in unruly politicians in front-line regions.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrukhanov has long had a serious conflict with political and ideological opponents; they considered him ideologically dangerous and warred with him for years,\u201d Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
Russia has not commented on the incident.<\/p>\n
At the time of publishing, Trukhanov had not responded to Al Jazeera\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n
During a news conference on October 15, he said he never held a Russian passport.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a moral execution. They just executed me,\u201d he told the journalists.<\/p>\n
He\u00a0is\u00a0under house arrest and is fighting to restore his citizenship.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, another row with a top official rocked Ukraine as Zelenskyy suspended Herman Haluschenko as justice minister for his presumed involvement in a corruption scandal in the energy industry.<\/p>\n
The scandal involved Zelenskyy\u2019s former business partner, who is said to have profited from kickbacks paid by companies that wanted contracts with Energoatom, the state-run monopoly that manages all of Ukraine\u2019s nuclear power stations, according to anticorruption prosecutors and media reports.<\/p>\n
Attacks on anticorruption activists<\/h2>\n
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long wanted to seize\u00a0Odesa, one of the Soviet era\u2019s most cosmopolitan hubs. It is known as a writer\u2019s city, has a literary museum and is famed for music and an absurdist sense of humour that helps Ukrainians cope with the war.<\/p>\n
In 2014, a Moscow-backed separatist uprising threatened the city as clashes killed about 50 people. In 2022, Russian troops tried to take over the city of one million. Today, lethal missiles and drones bring terror to Odesa as the war rages on, while the port\u2019s operations are regularly disrupted.<\/p>\n
After the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 occupation of Ukraine\u2019s ports on the Sea of Azov, the city became a lifeline maritime export route for Ukraine\u2019s grain and steel.<\/p>\n
Trukhanov stayed on as mayor after Zelenskyy came to power on an anticorruption ticket in 2019.<\/p>\n
Activists in Odesa have claimed Trukhanov allowed corruption and crime to prevail in the years before Zelenskyy\u2019s presidency began.<\/p>\n
In 2018, Transparency International Ukraine listed a dozen attacks on activists and \u201cpolitically exposed persons\u201d in the city as it published a letter signed by civil society representatives calling for action.<\/p>\n
In 2019, anticorruption activist Mykhailo Kuzakon told Al Jazeera, \u201cIt was Trukhanov\u2019s goons\u201d, as he described how a truck allegedly sped up to run him over near his house in Odesa. He survived the incident, which took place a year earlier, but his colleague\u2019s car was destroyed. During the interview, Kuzakon, the head of the Narodny Rukh (People\u2019s Movement) anticorruption organisation, was wearing a bulletproof vest and had two government-provided bodyguards next to him.<\/p>\n
Investigations into the attack on him and other activists did not conclude that Trukhanov was involved after key witnesses refused to testify and evidence went missing.<\/p>\n
An excuse for sacking?<\/h2>\n
Kyiv had been afraid of possible protest rallies that could follow Trukhanov\u2019s sacking, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany\u2019s Bremen University, until a tragic calamity provided a useful excuse.<\/p>\n
On October 1, torrential rains flooded Odesa, damaging hundreds of buildings and killing 11, including a child. Critics said the disaster highlighted the Trukhanov administration\u2019s failure to build an effective drainage system despite perennial warnings.<\/p>\n
And for the rest of Ukraine, Zelenskyy\u2019s administration \u201creanimated the story with [Trukhanov\u2019s Russian] passport that is 15 years old and that didn\u2019t stop [the mayor] from effectively managing Odesa during the three-and-a-half years of war,\u201d Mitrokhin told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
Some Odesans agree.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody has known for years that Trukhanov had a Russian passport. Everybody has known about his ties to the mob and his hand in every pie,\u201d Oleh, a 43-year-old Odesa native who withheld his last name as he fears for his safety, told Al Jazeera. \u201cHe was sacked because only now Zelenskyy is strong enough to get him out of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1998, Italian police described Trukhanov as part of a mafia group suspected of extortion and arms trafficking. Their report said Trukhanov used a Greek passport and was responsible for training gang members in hand-to-hand combat and sniper shooting.<\/p>\n
Trukhanov denied the claims but admitted friendship with the people identified as the gang\u2019s leaders.<\/p>\n
Others have mixed feelings about Trukhanov\u2019s legacy, crediting him with defending Odesa from Russian forces, but also snubbing the historic centre of the city, founded in 1794.<\/p>\n
\u201cOdesa is dirty and shabby. He didn\u2019t take good care of it; [historic] buildings need renovation, trees need a trim,\u201d office manager Zynaida, who moved to Odesa from central Ukraine, told Al Jazeera. She withheld her last name for safety reasons.<\/p>\n
Trukhanov will not be replaced by an elected mayor. His 70-year-old deputy, former university professor Ihor Koval, is now acting mayor. Zelenskyy has appointed General Serhiy Lysak as head of Odesa\u2019s military administration.<\/p>\n
Lysak is connected to Zelenskyy\u2019s political clan, which mostly consists of figures from the cities of Dnipro and Kryvyi Rih. The group had already tried to gain a foothold in Odesa in 2014, said analyst Mitrokhin.<\/p>\n
Ex-boxer boxed in<\/h2>\n
Trukhanov\u2019s dismissal followed Zelenskyy\u2019s pressure on other powerful heavyweights, including a literal one.<\/p>\n
Vitali Klitschko, a former heavyweight boxing champion and mayor of Kyiv since 2014, has been embroiled in a power\u00a0struggle\u00a0with Zelenskyy for years.<\/p>\n
Klitschko disliked Zelenskyy long before the president \u2013 a popular comedian, actor and producer \u2013 became a politician.<\/p>\n
Zelenskyy\u2019s District 95 comic troupe mocked Klitschko, portraying him in their routines as incoherent.<\/p>\n
In real life, Klitschko was a close ally of Zelenskyy\u2019s presidential predecessor and main rival, Petro Poroshenko.<\/p>\n
In 2023, Zelenskyy\u00a0accused Klitschko of failing safety measures after a missile attack killed a nine-year-old girl, her mother and their neighbour as they tried to enter a closed-down bomb shelter.<\/p>\n
Their feud grew after Zelenskyy\u2019s appointment of \u201cmartial law chief\u201d\u00a0Tymur Tkachenko as head of Kyiv\u2019s military administration in late 2023.<\/p>\n
Tkachenko took over some administrative responsibilities, but critics doubted the necessity of such a figure in the city that sits hundreds of kilometres from the front line. When Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russian forces failed to seize Kyiv and withdrew from the region.<\/p>\n
The Klitschko and Trukhanov rows could manifest Zelenskyy\u2019s push to quell political opposition \u201cat least\u201d in Ukraine\u2019s south and centre.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s where he sees his electoral base,\u201d analyst Mitrokhin told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
He predicted that Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv in western Ukraine and another notable critic of Zelenskyy, could be sidelined as the region voted against Zelenskyy in the 2019 vote.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013 Pro-Moscow sympathies, corruption and multimillion-dollar embezzlement, reported ties to Ukrainian, Greek and Italian mobsters and the orchestration of assaults on almost a dozen anticorruption whistleblowers. That is just an abridged list of the accusations\u00a0Gennadiy Trukhanov has faced since 2014, when he was elected mayor of Odesa, the nation\u2019s third-largest city and home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2039,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}