The Centralization of Power in Ukraine

The local elections in autumn 2020 marked the first serious setback for Zelensky’s team. After the 2019 triumph, when the president’s name alone guaranteed victory for his candidates, the country sobered up quickly. Criticism of the government mounted, and growing distrust of political parties also affected Servant of the People.

Local elites took advantage of the moment, launching their own projects to maintain control over cities and regions. One of them, the “Proposition” bloc, sought to present itself as a moderate alternative to the former Party of Regions. As a result, the pro-presidential party failed to secure a single mayoral seat in any regional capital. In Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, his candidate lost; in Kharkiv, Hennadiy Kernes was re-elected while in a coma due to COVID-19 complications—he died shortly after his victory.

In Odesa, voters once again backed Hennadiy Trukhanov, who had led the city since 2014. A former Soviet Army officer, he founded a private security agency during the turbulent 1990s and was closely linked to the criminal underworld. In the 2000s, he cooperated with Russian businesses, including the Ukrainian branch of Lukoil. Later, Trukhanov built a political career within the Party of Regions but distanced himself from it in advance. During the events of spring 2014 in Odesa, he took a cautious yet distinctly pro-Russian stance.

For Ukrainian nationalists and the liberal public, Trukhanov became a toxic figure; yet for much of Odesa’s population, he remained an acceptable, even convenient choice. Rumors about his Russian citizenship had circulated since 2014 but did not prevent his re-election. Later, in 2016, the Panama Papers leak confirmed that he had registered offshore companies using a Russian passport.

Like Kernes, Trukhanov served as a useful intermediary between Kyiv and the southeastern regional elites. Both politicians, who emerged from the semi-criminal business scene and retained Russophile sympathies, nevertheless sought to remain loyal to Ukraine—primarily to protect their own interests. In 2015, they even founded a joint party called “Trust Deeds.” Their pragmatism and influence helped keep the region away from openly pro-Russian movements.

In the 2020 elections, Trukhanov’s main rival was Mykola Skoryk, the candidate from the Opposition Platform–For Life party, who received strong backing from Russian television channels. The Russian network NTV even released a film titled “Bad Hennadys,” portraying Trukhanov and Kernes as “traitors to the Russian world.”

Trukhanov’s name has repeatedly appeared in corruption cases. In 2017, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) accused him of embezzling public funds and falsifying asset declarations. In 2018, he was arrested but soon released on bail posted by members of parliament. In November 2020, the Constitutional Court dismissed the case over his asset declarations. However, in 2022, businessmen close to him—Borys Kaufman and Oleksandr Hranovskyi—were detained on suspicion of running a criminal group. A year later, in May 2023, Trukhanov himself was again arrested on charges of illegally appropriating property from a local factory, but once more released on bail.

Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration is increasingly resorting to methods that raise questions about legality. Among them are National Security Council sanctions applied to Ukrainian citizens and the practice of revoking citizenship through confidential presidential decrees.

This measure had already been used against oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and Dnipro businessman Hennadiy Korban—both of whom clashed with Presidential Office chief Andriy Yermak—as well as against Metropolitan Onufriy, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

The formal justification in each case was the possession of dual citizenship, which violates Ukrainian law; a Russian passport was treated as an aggravating circumstance.

Now Odesa Mayor Hennadiy Trukhanov has been subjected to the same procedure. Yet the evidence presented by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) sparked a scandal—the foreign passport displayed by law enforcement turned out to be fake.

The decision followed a prolonged conflict between Trukhanov and Odesa Regional Military Administration head Oleh Kiper. A former prosecutor from the Odesa region, Kiper began consolidating power from the day of his appointment, while Trukhanov—long accustomed to being the city’s undisputed boss—saw him as a threat.

Kiper’s own biography is also controversial: in 2014, he was lustrated as a figure close to former Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka and later mentioned in investigations into corruption schemes involving Russian assets. The revelation that his wife holds Russian citizenship triggered an additional scandal.

The confrontation between Trukhanov and Kiper extended beyond competition over finances and authority to ideological disputes. Kiper backed the campaign to “decolonize” Odesa’s urban toponymy and remove monuments to Russian figures, while Trukhanov argued for preserving the city’s historical heritage.

After being stripped of his citizenship, Trukhanov will likely lose his position as mayor, though he intends to fight back. He still has support among parts of the local electorate and business community, both frustrated by Kyiv’s interference. Retreat is not an option for him—in Russia, where he has long been viewed as a traitor to the “Russian world,” he would hardly find refuge.

No new elections will be held in Odesa while martial law remains in effect. Governance of the city will be divided between the city council secretary from the Servant of the People party, who now serves as acting mayor, and the head of the city’s military administration. Following the revocation of Hennadiy Trukhanov’s citizenship, mayoral duties passed to City Council Secretary Ihor Koval—a member of President Zelensky’s Servant of the People party and former rector of Odesa Mechnikov National University. During his decade in office, the university was repeatedly embroiled in scandals over the transfer of university land for development, and in 2020 Koval was at the center of a controversy over the eviction of students from dormitories. In the past, he ran for office with Viktor Medvedchuk’s party and took part in rallies supporting Viktor Yanukovych. Even during the full-scale war, in 2023, Koval stated that Ukraine should not join NATO until hostilities end and that after the war, Eastern European armies should scale back their arsenals. According to sources, he is considered politically dependent on former regional governor Serhiy Hrynevetskyi. That post has already been given by Zelensky to former Security Service officer Serhiy Lysak, who previously headed the SBU departments in Zhytomyr and Dnipro regions and later led the administration in Dnipro.

The move sends an unambiguous signal to other mayors unwilling to obey the central government. Among them are Vitali Klitschko—long engaged in a power struggle with Zelensky’s team—as well as the mayors of Dnipro and Kharkiv, Borys Filatov and Ihor Terekhov.

Martial law has allowed Volodymyr Zelensky to remove numerous internal irritants and tighten control over the political system. The growing influence of the central government over local authorities has become one of the clearest expressions of this trend. The case of Hennadiy Trukhanov fits into a broader pattern in which Kyiv has effectively removed elected mayors of major cities.

A year earlier, in the spring of 2023, Poltava Mayor Oleksandr Mamai had been removed from office after receiving a suspended sentence for embezzlement. Chernihiv Mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko was also accused of abuse of power and dismissed. Formally, most such cases are tied to corruption or other violations, yet the fact remains: these figures were elected by their communities, and their removal appears politically motivated.

The decentralization reform carried out after 2014 was considered one of the key achievements of the post-revolutionary period. It granted regions genuine autonomy—both financial and administrative—allowing Ukraine to move beyond its old debate over federalism versus unitarism with a new formula: a unified country with strong local governance.

Now, however, the war is pushing the system back toward centralization. Military-civil administrations and appointed commissioners are gradually displacing mayors, while the prolonged absence of elections erodes the foundations of self-government. Yet it was decentralization that proved its effectiveness in the early days of the invasion: having their own powers and resources allowed regions to organize defenses quickly without waiting for instructions from Kyiv—unlike Russia’s occupation structures, where all initiative is suppressed.

Of course, Ukraine’s system of local self-government is far from perfect: corruption, nepotism, and inefficiency remain pervasive. Yet tightening control from the center is unlikely to solve these problems. By removing politicians like Trukhanov—often accused of having ties to pro-Russian circles—the government risks losing figures who once helped maintain a delicate balance. It was precisely such actors who stabilized the country’s southeast in the first months of the invasion.

The case of Oleksandr Vilkul is telling: a former governor under Yanukovych and one of the leaders of the Opposition Bloc, he took charge of the Kryvyi Rih military administration in 2022 and played a key role in the city’s defense. Now, he too faces scrutiny. But sidelining compromise-oriented regional players could upset the fragile equilibrium in front-line regions, where stability is of strategic importance.

Centralization—whether aimed at streamlining governance or preparing for future elections—undermines the informal consensus between the state and society that emerged in Ukraine after 2014. Trukhanov himself is unlikely to become a rallying point for opposition to Zelensky, yet the way he was removed has provoked irritation both domestically and among Western partners.

The political and administrative experiments pursued by the president’s team are yielding diminishing returns. A recent attempt to curb the independence of anti-corruption bodies triggered the first street protests since the start of the war. Pressure on local authorities produces the same effect—growing mistrust. Zelensky appears to underestimate the depth of public frustration, and the cost of future missteps could be far higher.