Kherson Oblast Governor Andriy Hordeyev has given his resignation to President Petro Poroshenko.
Activists accuse the governor of involvement in the murder of Kherson city council member and anti-corruption activist Kateryna Gandziuk last year. Hordeyev has denied the allegations, but eventually gave into demands by activists and Gandziuk’s friends and supporters to resign.
In an April 6 Facebook post, Hordeyev wrote that he didn’t want the accusations against him to damage President Petro Poroshenko’s chances for reelection in the second round of the Ukrainian presidential election on April 21.
“I don’t want the repercussions of a campaign of character assassination against me to undermine the peace in our country and in the Kherson region,” he wrote. “I don’t want the negativity fabricated against me to have an adverse effect on the second round of the presidential election and the Commander-in-Chief.”
Hordeyev made the decision to resign after a meeting with President Poroshenko, according to Daria Kaleniuk, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center. She received this information directly from Poroshenko during an April 6 meeting between the president and a group of civil society activists, Kaleniuk wrote.
Hordeyev became the head of the Kherson Oblast Administration in April 2016. Before that, he had been a member of the Ukrainian parliament with the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, which leads the ruling coalition.
Kateryna Gandziuk, an anti-corruption activist, member of Kherson city council and an adviser to the city mayor, was seriously injured in an acid attack in July 2018. She succumbed to her injuries in a Kyiv hospital in November 2018.
Gandziuk’s murder shocked Ukraine and sparked protests in both Kherson and Kyiv. Her killing became a symbol of criminal impunity in a series of unpunished attacks on journalists and activists around Ukraine.
Her murder continues to be investigated.
Read more: Who killed Katya Gandziuk
In January, her father Viktor Gandziuk claimed that the organizer of his daughter’s murder was linked to high-ranking Kherson officials — namely, Governor Hordeyev, his deputy Yevhen Ryshchuk, and Kherson Oblast Council Chair Vladyslav Manger.
Manger was suspended from his office, served a notice of suspicion, arrested, and released on bail in February. The Batkivschyna party expelled him from its ranks.
Ryshchyk took a polygraph test at the end of March, but the results have not been publicly announced.
Read more: Martyrs For Truth: Whistleblower’s murder highlights judicial impotency
