You're reading: Kryvyi Rih will hold new election for mayor on March 27

Ukraine’s parliament in a vote on Dec.23 appointed re-run of the scandal-plagued mayoral election in Kryvyi Rih in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

The
law, supported by 239 lawmakers, also removed Mayor
Yuriy Vilkul, a member of the Opposition Bloc and former
ally of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych.

The
vote followed two days of protests near the Verkhovna Rada, where residents of
Kryvyi Rih — a city of 650,000 people located 400 kilometers southeast of Kyiv
— have been demanding re-election.

Vilkul’s
opponents claimed that he won the Nov. 15 elections by rigging the vote. He
denied all the accusations.

Vilkul
then gathered 49.25 percent of
votes, while his competitor in the mayoral run-off election Yuriy Milobog from
Samopomich Party received 48.83 percent, lacking only 752 votes. The Verkhovna
Rada commission on voting fraud in Kryvyi Rih on Dec. 7 ruled that there were
violations during the mayoral election.

Samopomich Party, and its head Yegor Sobolev,
were zealous supporters of the re-election. Sobolev’s emotions turned into a
scandal, when trying to lead activists inside the parliament, he asked the
guardians who wouldn’t let them: “Do you want the grenade (thrown at Rada)
again?”

After being accused of threatening the security
officers, Sobolev explained that it was “a warning.”

According to his Facebook page, Samopomich
faction applied for entrance passes for 10 activists from Kryvyi Rih, but
security said it didn’t get any letters and didn’t want to let them in.

Sobolev said he asked to let the activists inside
so they could wait for their passes in the hall, the superintendent said he
couldn’t allow that.

“Then I blew up. Who can allow what to whom?
Does the parliament belong to superintendent? Does the parliament belong to
(Parliament’s Speaker Volodymyr) Groysman? Does the parliament belong to
Sobolev? No, it belongs to people,” he wrote, adding that it reminded him of
the Yanukovych’s regime.

After Verkhovna Rada adopted the law, head
of the pro-presidential Bloc of Poroshenko faction Yuriy Lutsenko
asked Sobolev
to apologize to the guardians, who “are ordinary people, whose salary is much
lower than the lawmaker’s.”

Sobolev said he already apologized to them, adding that they
understood “we were on the same side.”

Groysman also apologized to Ukrainians, saying that “sometimes
we use our status, don’t control ourselves and disgrace the Ukraine’s
parliament.”

Sobolev
championed the parliament’s decision, but added that this victory isn’t yet the
victory at the mayoral election.

“We
still need to organize it, to invite the observers from the entire Ukraine and
Europe, and to count the choice of the Kryvyi Rih residents fairly. And to
respect it,” he wrote on his Facebook page minutes after the vote.

Lawmaker
Oleksandr Vilkul, a member of the
Opposition Bloc and son of Yuriy Vilkul, called the parliament’s decision a
“chaos, organized by the band of raiders, who just want to seize Kryvyi Rih.”

He noted that the Opposition Bloc will still
take part in the elections, and assured the party’s candidate would win again.