An ongoing conflict between Kyiv authorities and the administration of President Volodymyr Zelensky flared up again on May 18, when Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that law enforcement tried to search his apartment.
Agents of the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, showed up at Klitschko’s residence, a building on Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street in central Kyiv next to the Opera Theater, on the morning of May 18. The SBU said the visit concerned a different apartment in the building and was part of an investigation into the counterfeiting of petroleum products.
But Klitschko said he believed that it was an attempt to intimidate him amid his standoff with Zelensky’s office.
Zelensky’s representatives have criticized Klitschko and hinted that he was involved in corruption at the city council. The conflict has simmered since Zelensky was elected president in 2019. But it entered a new phase in mid-May, when authorities conducted dozens of searches at the Kyiv City Council, alleging corruption in several key departments.
At the time, Klitschko also denied the corruption allegations and said that the searches were a campaign of political pressure against him. He has the same explanation for the SBU’s visit to his apartment building.
According to the mayor, the surveillance cameras on his floor recorded the SBU representatives ring his doorbell and knock on his door. Klitschko wasn’t home; he said he left at 7 a.m. to work out and ran into law enforcers when he returned.
Klitschko said he didn’t believe that the SBU was there to search a different apartment because the other residents on his floor are “old women who work at the Opera Theater.”
“It’s not a secret that the office of President (Volodymyr Zelensky) has frequent meetings ‘about Klitschko,'” he said, talking to the media at an impromptu press briefing near his house on May 18. “I know they don’t like it when I demand that we have a lockdown when our hospitals are overflowing with patients, or that I call on the mayors of different cities to join forces.”
Klitschko is vulnerable because Zelensky’s office has the power to fire him as the head of the Kyiv City Administration — a powerful administrative position that is parallel to the mayor’s job. Klitschko has held both jobs — as the president-appointed head of administration and the elected mayor — since 2014.
If the presidential administration takes away Klitschko’s head of administration title, Klitschko will lose half of his powers in the city. He insists that it would be wrong to do that to an elected mayor, to whom the people of Kyiv entrusted the job.
Zelensky’s party, Servant of the People, tried to challenge Klitschko at the October 2020 local elections. However, the party’s mayoral candidate, Iryna Vereshchuk, got only 5.4% of the vote.
