A young, vocal Batkivshchyna Party parliament member Olesya Orobets said she plans to run for mayor of Kyiv in the May 25 election. She announced her intention via her Facebook page.
“The aim is to build a new Ukraine,
starting from Kyiv. It’s the Ukraine we have all dreamed up and
fought for,” the 31-year-old candidate said.
Orobets said that she wanted to make
Kyiv neat like Vienna, filled with tourists like Rome and a center
of business activity like London.
“I am prepared to take power only
directly from the hands of citizens,” Orobets wrote in her Facebook
post. Kyiv has not had an elected mayor for nearly two years, and has
instead been run by city managers appointed by the president. The
city has not had a fully functional council since last July, when the
term of the old council expired.
Using a controversial ruling by the
Constitutional Court as a pretext, President Viktor Yanukovych’s administration refused to set
a date for the new election. The last elected mayor, Leonid Chernovetsky, served from 2006 until 2012, when the Yanukovych administration ousted him and appointed Oleksandr Popov to take charge. Kyivans have not had a chance to elect their mayor or city council since 2008.
But after the EuroMaidan Revolution, the date for a new council and mayoral election was set on the same date as the
presidential election.
Orobets said she was planning to
conduct a fully crowd-sourced and crowd-funded, transparent campaign
for the first time in Ukraine’s history of mayoral elections. “With
transparent financing, an understandable one, and one that is responsible
for all the words uttered,” she said.
She said as of March 5 she was forming
a team which will later run the city, and encouraged volunteers to
join. “Everyone who feels internal strength, bravery, desire and
dare – come and join. Nobody has ever done this before. Let’s win,”
she said.
Orobets was born in Kyiv and
trained as an international lawyer at the prestigious Institute for
Foreign Relations. A fluent English speaker, she assisted her father, Yuriy Orobets, in his
work as a a member of parliament, and worked briefly in law firms,
including Baker & McKenzie.
After his death in a car accident in
2006, she effectively replaced him in the Our Ukraine-Self Defense
block party list in the 2007 parliamentary election.
Soon after her election, Orobets was accused
of driving a luxury car that she could not afford, but said that
she and her husband, Oleksandr Omelchuk, who owns Phoenix Capital, an
investment bank in Ukraine, in fact have enough money for the car. The vehicle also featured a prestigious license plate number exclusive to members of parliament.
Orobets
was the founder of Retail Credit Group, a consulting company that
assists clients in receiving mortgage loans. Orobets’
husband had his company raided last year, and was forced to flee from
Ukraine. Many interpreted the attack on his business as retaliation
against his wife’s oppositional activities.
During the EuroMaidan Revolution that toppled Yanukovych as president on Feb. 22, Orobets was often at
the front lines, frequently speaking from stage wearing a flack vest while taking part in
evacuation of injured people from hospitals in Kyiv.
Before the
revolution, in coordination with anti-corruption non-governmental organizations, she conducted a number of investigations into rigged
government tenders for the purchase of medicine, as well as other
anti-corruption investigations.
When analyzing her activities as a parliament member before the 2012 presidential election, pro-transparency Chesno campaign discovered that sometime Orobets failed to vote in person as required by the Constitution, and missed many meetings of the committee on science and education she was a member of, but found no proof of corruption or problems with her tax declaration.
Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]
