For Oleksandr Kubrakov, repairing and building roads is a new endeavor — even though he’s the head of Ukraine’s state road agency, Ukravtodor.
Kubrakov, 37, used to work in tech and telecoms. Now, all of a sudden, he is leading a major road transformation in Ukraine, where the quality of highways is among the worst in the world.
A lawmaker with the ruling 247-member Servant of the People, Kubrakov got the job in late 2019 and became responsible for maintaining 45,000 kilometers of roads, more than two-thirds of which are in poor or critical condition.
This year, the agency plans to repair 4,200 kilometers of roads, a distance that Ukraine has never done before. In fact, this is all only happening because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants to be “remembered as the president who built good roads in Ukraine.”
The tool to achieve that is a large-scale infrastructure program called Big Construction, which received a record $3.4 billion in state money for 2020 alone.
As of mid-summer, 1,005 kilometers of roads have already been repaired and put into operation. Under its previous director, former Polish Minister of Transport Slawomir Nowak, Ukravtodor repaired only 850 kilometers.
On July 20, Nowak was arrested in Warsaw on corruption charges connected to his work at Ukravtodor.
Tender scandals
Winning road construction tenders in Ukraine can be extraordinarily difficult for construction companies. The reason is that some tenders have reportedly been designed to be difficult to win.
Journalists from the Bihus.info investigative project reported in May that Ukravtodor created a controversial scheme setting specific requirements that made it nearly impossible for small companies to take part in tenders.
In the past two years, just three companies — Onur, Ukrainian Avtomagistral-Pivden and Rostdorstroy, which is often associated with Odesa Mayor Hennady Trukhanov — have won a third of all Ukravtodor’s contracts on road repairs.
The investigation also found that Ukravtodor allowed some contractors to buy asphalt, a major component in road construction which accounts for 50–60% of tender prices, at significantly higher prices.
This may have allowed corrupt actors to pocket some $650 million of allocated state funds this year. Ukravtodor denied the accusations, saying that the agency doesn’t inflate asphalt prices or have any influence over price formation.
Later, on June 18, another investigative project, Nashi Groshi, reported that Ukravtodor had announced the largest tender in its history, worth nearly $490 million, to construct a 30-kilometer section of the Dnipro–Reshetylivka highway. While Zelensky recently said that one kilometer of road in Ukraine costs around $1 million, one kilometer of this road will cost 10 times more.
Moreover, the tender requirement was very strict: The income of the company over the past year should be more than one-third of the tender.
Only two companies could compete under these criteria: Onur and Avtomagistral-Pivden.
But Kubrakov said that the road would have bridges, overpasses and other constructions, and so it’s too early to give the exact cost for a single kilometer. But he’s sure that it won’t cost “more or less than it was on previous sections of the same road.”
Kubrakov agreed that shady tender schemes existed in the past and he admitted that the agency has indeed raised requirements for participation in tenders — to accelerate road construction in Ukraine, he said.
“We want to build high-quality roads and we want to do it fast,” Kubrakov said, adding that no tenders were designed for “concrete construction companies.”
No European-like roads
For Kubrakov, today’s Ukrainian road construction looks very similar to eastern European countries like the Czech Republic or Poland, where five to seven key players form 40% of the market and the rest of the market is filled with 15–20 companies.
In contrast, western European countries like France, Germany and Austria have two or three companies that take 50–60% of the market.
In Ukraine, there are no European contractors and “it’s Ukravtodor’s pain.” The reason: Outdated Soviet road price setting using so-called “cost sheets” — which include multiple indicators and are often controlled by a number of state agencies — instead of just a clear report on the cost of 1 kilometer of road.
When Kubrakov visited the Vienna headquarters of Strabag, one of the largest construction companies in Europe, the first question from the company’s representative was: “Do you still have those cost sheets?”
For Strabag, their experiences in Russia this outdated system of reports was enough to stop any cooperation with countries where it still exists, including Ukraine.
“There are a lot of stupid things (in Ukraine’s legislation),” Kubrakov said. “No one in the world works like this.”
According to Kubrakov, the new law on eliminating archaic norms has already been submitted to the Ukrainian parliament and promises to end many problems for road construction.
“We want to make it work like in European countries,” Kubrakov said.
Instead of European contractors, Ukraine works with Azerbaijani firm Azvirt, Turkish Onur and Ukrainian contractors Avtomagistral, Autostrada, and a few others.
Chinese companies are on Ukravtodor’s blacklist: They have a bad reputation after they failed several road projects in Ukraine, including a bypass road around Zhytomyr. Chinese companies have been building it for four years.
Currently, there are 58 road construction companies, both Ukrainian and foreign, operating in the country. Around 15–20 companies work actively across the country, employing nearly 11,000 workers. Many of the construction workers came from non-related industries, as they lost their jobs during the crisis caused by the COVID‑19 pandemic.
“They learn fast and it won’t influence the quality of the roads,” said Kubrakov.
Ukraine needs bridges
After eight months heading Ukravtodor, Kubrakov’s expectations of the state of Ukrainian roads almost match reality. But one thing still left him speechless: bridges. Some collapsed during his tenure.
“In every trip to the regions, you’ll see a bridge that is not completed and has been standing this way for many years,” Kubrakov said.
Some unfinished bridges are more than 20 years old. Although a few big bridges are being repaired in Ukraine — including one by Turkish construction company Onur in Zaporizhia, a city of 800,000 people on the Dnipro River — this is still just the tip of the iceberg.
“The situation is catastrophic,” Kubrakov said.
Out of all 16,155 bridges and overpasses in Ukraine, nearly 1,500 are in critical condition. More than 80% of the bridges were built before 1980, and almost 65% don’t meet modern standards. The agency plans to repair 103 bridges in 2020.
While Kubrakov would prefer that there were “no such objects in the country in principle,” the chances that Ukrainians will have modern functional bridges in the nearest future are low because the national bridge construction industry is currently on the verge of extinction.
“Only two specialists graduated with a masters degree in bridge construction from the National Transportation University this year,” Kubrakov said. “For the whole country, the number should be 10.”
To try to solve this problem, the agency is preparing a state program to support students with additional scholarships to incentivize them to choose this speciality and to learn how to construct bridges.
Priority roads for 2020
There are several top repair priorities for Kubrakov this year, including completion of the Kyiv–Kharkiv and Kyiv–Chernihiv roads.
Some repairs have already been completed and the newly renovated roads will soon be open for drivers. They include the road between Kyiv and the city of Znamenka in Сherkasy Oblast, which was one of the five worst roads in the country.
“Now it’s an ideal road and we’re in the process of marking it,” said Kubrakov.
Another 130-kilometer road between Severodonetsk and Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Luhansk Oblast is almost done too. “There was no road at all and, in a few weeks, it will be put into operation,” Kubrakov said.
Other brand new roads — in Mykolaiv, Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv oblasts — will be open soon as well.
The next projects, which are being engineered, are a 314-kilometer Kyiv-Odesa highway and a northern bypass of the city of Lviv in Ukraine’s west. For these roads, Ukraine received 900 million euros in funding from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank.
At the same time, Ukravtodor has not started repairs of one of the worst Ukrainian roads — 250 kilometers stretching from the city of Kropyvnytskyi to neighbouring Moldova. Drivers complain and advise others to avoid this road when planning trips.
“This year, we are not even going to try to do it,” Kubrakov said.
Overweight trucks
When a truck with a capacity of 40 tons is overloaded by 25%, it may not seem like a big deal. But, actually, it damages the road. It’s as if 70,500 cars drove on that road simultaneously. And it will create potholes in the new road in just a few years.
For Ukraine, this is a problem. The country is heavily dependent on agriculture and harvests millions of tons of grains every year. It transfers them on trucks — especially through the southern Ukrainian oblasts Mykolaiv, Kherson and Odesa.
To protect the roads, many countries have a weigh-in-motion system designed to automatically capture and record the weight of each truck driving the road. For them, it’s already a routine tool. For Ukraine, it’s a rarely used technology.
There are only six weigh-in-motion systems — all in Kyiv, installed at the entrance to the city. And they are still working in test mode, so fines are not yet imposed.
This year, according to Kubrakov, Ukravtodor plans to install 23 more systems across the state, including in one of the places most affected by overloaded trucks, Mykolaiv Oblast.
“In all the big road projects that we are doing this year, we will install those automatic weight control systems,” Kubrakov said.
At the same time, the State Service of Ukraine for Transport Safety, designed to perform truck weighing procedures on Ukrainian roads, is often accused of corruption. Its staff used to systematically demand bribes from truck drivers to allow them pass control even with massively overweight vehicles.
Kubrakov said that’s already in the past and if the truck is overloaded, then the driver is fined. In some of the most severe cases — for trucks 50% overweight, for example — the fines can reach over 6,000 euros.
“The situation has changed dramatically,” he said. “I see statistics and, when the service started to work properly, the number of violations decreased sharply.”
