Lviv’s chronic waste problem is raising a stink again – this time on the presidential campaign trail.
Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, a city of 721,000 located 500 kilometers west from Kyiv, and a presidential candidate, on Feb. 8 accused the President Petro Poroshenko, who’s seeking reelection, of exploiting Lviv’s waste problem to secure the support of Sadovyi’s faction in parliament.
Sadovyi, the leader of the Samopomich party that has 25 seats in parliament, said that people from the president’s inner circle contacted him back in 2016 with the promise to resolve Lviv’s waste problem in return for his supporting the pro-presidential coalition in parliament. He published a draft agreement that he said he was offered to sign.
Lviv’s waste crisis began in May 2016. After a fire forced a landfill near the city to close, garbage started to pile up on the streets of the largest city in western Ukraine. Sadovyi and members of Samopomich accused the president and his team, which included Lviv Oblast Governor Oleh Siniutka, who was appointed by the president, of stopping Lviv from sending its waste to other regions for disposal. Lviv garbage trucks were banned from entering other Ukrainian cities.
Siniutka denied blocking the garbage trucks from leaving Lviv and, in his turn, accused Sadovyi of using the waste conflict for political purposes.
Sadovyi’s faction left the government coalition in mid-February of 2016. As a result, the president’s party and the second-biggest faction, People’s Front, had to form a new coalition, but barely scrambled enough members.
Sadovyi said he met with Borys Lozhkin, then head of the presidential administration, and Vitaliy Kovalchuk, the deputy head of presidential administration, in June 2016. According to Sadovyi, he was offered assistance in resolving the issue in return for supporting presidential decrees and policies.
“In return, the president promised to give the command to stop the blockade (of waste from Lviv),” Sadovyi said on Feb. 8 in an interview with Channel 24, which the Lviv mayor owns.
Neither Lozhkin nor Kovalchuk answered the Kyiv Post’s requests to comment on the allegations.
Oksana Syroyid, a deputy speaker of Ukraine’s parliament and a top member of Samopomich, said that the situation is outrageous, both from a moral standpoint and a legal one.
The affair implies that the president of Ukraine held citizens of one of Ukraine’s cities hostage, says Syroyid, adding that blocking the work of the city’s utility companies was a crime.
Syroyid goes even further, claiming that the fire on the Lviv landfill, in which four people died and which was the start of Lviv’s waste problems, was set deliberately by people connected to the president.
When asked why Sadovyi was publishing the 2016 document only now, less than two months before the presidential elections on March 31, Syroyid told the Kyiv Post that they couldn’t go public earlier because of pressure from the presidential team.
Sadovyi on his Facebook page wrote that he was revealing the document because the situation had become critical once again, with the Poroshenko-appointed governor of Lviv Oblast blocking the construction of a recycling plant. The city in June signed an agreement on receiving 35 million euros in funding from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to construct the long-awaited plant.
But Yevhen Mahda, a political analyst and the head of Institute of World Policy, said Sadovyi had left his revelations too late to help his campaign for the presidency.
“If he had showed this document in 2016 (when the waste crisis was ongoing), then it would have had some kind of relevance,” said Mahda.
According to Mahda, the way the document was presented and the timing doesn’t help Sadovyi’s campaign. He said that while Samopomich had earlier hinted the existence of the document for over three years, publishing “a piece of paper with some vague bullet points in the midst of the election campaign was not credible.”
Mahda argued that Sadovyi’s main goal was not the upcoming presidential elections, but the upcoming parliamentary elections, scheduled to take place in October 2019. The leader of Samopomich is trying to present his political force as an important opposition platform, the political analyst said.
However, Sergiy Gaiday, a well-known Ukraine political consultant, said Sadovyi’s claims were believable.
“I followed the conflict (from 2016), when it took place, and Sadovyi couldn’t solve the problems with the garbage because of the central government’s position,” Gaiday told the Kyiv Post.
“Imagine that you’re the president, who controls both the legislative and executive branch, and one of your cities is forced to close a landfill site, wouldn’t you, being socially responsible, help with this issue?” asked Gaiday.
Gaiday said the only two people that know the real story are those directly involved – Sadovyi and Poroshenko.
However, neither were available for comment.
