LVIV, UKRAINE – Andriy Sadovyi knows how to hold on to his mayoral position. He has been head of Lviv since 2006, making him the longest serving mayor of any major city in Ukraine.
His city, located some 540 kilometers west of Kyiv, is now one of the most attractive places for foreign investors, with booming tourism, construction and tech sectors.
But this mayor’s political activities also stretch beyond the limits of his city. Sadovyi’s political party – Samopomich (Self-Reliance), which has 26 seats in parliament, plans to participate in the upcoming presidential and parliament elections in 2019. Although Sadovyi has not announced a run for the presidency in March, he has said his party will nominate a candidate. The latest polls indicate that if he did choose to run, he would start the race at the back of the pack and would be an unlikely winner.
The Kyiv Post talked with Sadovyi about attracting Western capital, running a political party, and his future plans.
Low ratings
Sadovyi and Samopomich, which has its base of support in western Ukraine, rode to success in the parliament elections in 2014 on the wave of patriotism that swept the country after the EuroMaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power. The party entered parliament for the first time, winning 32 seats, but six members left or were excluded from the faction since then.
Sadovyi is mostly known for boosting the fortunes of Lviv, western Ukraine’s capital with 723,000 people. He has had success in promoting its tourist and investment potential, and was reelected as the city’s mayor for a third time in 2015. According to him, Lviv today is what many dream for the rest of Ukraine. And he feels he is the man who could make that dream come true.
“My entry into (national) politics was because of the fact that I’ve achieved the limit of what I could do in Lviv,” he said. “You cannot build a successful city without building a successful country.”
But while Samopomich will probably continue to be a force in parliament, the latest polls suggest there will be no President Sadovyi: in a survey by pollsters rating in July, Sadovyi received only 2.2 percent support, compared to 17.1 percent for the leading candidate Yuliya Tymoshenko. His national support is also on a downward trajectory – in 2015 Sadovyi polled at 6-7 percent as a candidate for president.
Garbage scandal
While other politicians have mud slung at them, Sadovyi’s rivals have been hurling garbage – a crisis in waste collection in Lviv trashed the mayor’s reputation in 2016, and the resulting political stink is still clearing.
It started with a fire at the city’s main landfill in the village of Hrybovychi, which caused the collapse of a waste heap. Three emergency workers were killed and a fourth was declared dead in 2017, the body never having been found.
The landfill was closed, and the city tried to send its garbage to other cities. But amid protests from residents, other local authorities refused to accept Lviv’s waste, and trash began to build up on the city’s streets. Central government entered the fray, accusing Sadovyi of mismanagement, with Sadovyi in turn claiming the powers in Kyiv were orchestrating the local protests to block shipments of Lviv’s waste to other cities’ landfills, thereby damaging him politically.
Sadovyi also claimed the fire had been started deliberately, and the Presidential Administration backed the campaign to discredit him. The Kyiv Post couldn’t reach the administration for the comment at the moment of publication.
The tragedy at the landfill was widely covered and the mayor attracted blame for failing to build a waste recycling plant to prevent the tragedy.
Sadovyi is convinced the whole mess was created by his political enemies.
“Steps were taken to block garbage transportation from the city, to eliminate Samopomich, to destroy Sadovyi,” he said. “It was definitely a special operation.”
“I think that this case will soon be studied in political science classes as a technological approach to attacking political opponents,” he said, adding that he has never considered himself as a political opponent of President Petro Poroshenko.
Sadovyi said he considered support from the government to be “when nobody interferes” in what he is doing.
“In our country, the approach is … either you are a slave, or you are an enemy. We will not be slaves.”
Garbage from Lviv is now disposed of around the oblast, as well as being sent to other cities. As a long-term solution, the city is now finalizing a deal to build a waste recycling plant. The local authorities had already allocated a land plot within the city, and are now picking a contractor from among 12 foreign companies with the help of a loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The plant should open in 2020.
The city also plans to reclaim the site of the landfill.
City strategy
The garbage cleared, Lviv has burnished its image as a tourist destination, with visitor numbers surpassing the pre-war peak: some 2.8 million tourists went to Lviv in 2017, compared to 1.7 million in 2013. And new flights planned by airlines Wizz Air, Ernest, LOT, and newcomer Ryanair promise to bring even more tourists to the city.
But moving all those tourists around the city sights is starting to become an urgent problem, with the city’s public transport system is already creaking and overloaded.
Many of the city’s fleet of small, uncomfortable taxi buses, known as marshrutkas, are to give way to larger city buses – the city has ordered 150 of them, the mayor said. As a bonus, the new vehicles will be partly made at the local Electron plant, an electric vehicle manufacturer.
The city administration has also purchased used trams from Germany, although some of these are unable to open their doors at some tram stops in the city.
And although Ukraine’s border with the European Union is not far to the west, the mayor is not worried about the labor and brain drain that is affecting the whole country. Internally displaced people, fleeing the war in eastern Ukraine, have taken the place of those that left the city, he said.
And seeing the area’s potential, western investors are opening factories in the oblast. However, they are mostly drawn by cheap local labor rather than highly educated specialists.
“Coming to Lviv and appreciating the atmosphere that we have here, people are actually deciding to invest in Ukraine,” Sadovyi said. “I think our territory is safer, (but) I would like to have the same atmosphere throughout Ukraine.”
Returning territories
While its leader works as mayor at the local level, Samopomich has a hand in approving national legislation in parliament in Kyiv. The party supported the Donbas reintegration law in January, which declared that Russia is an aggressor state, that parts of the Donbas are illegally occupied by Russian-controlled troops, and that these areas are administered by self-proclaimed Russian occupation authorities. The law also formally ended the so-called “Anti-Terrorist Operation” and launched its replacement – the Joint Forces Operation.
“I’d be really glad if we returned, as soon as possible, the territories that are ours – Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk,” Sadovyi said.
But reintegrating the populations of these territories will take time, as the locals in Russian-occupied territory have been brainwashed by Russian television, Sadovyi said.
Getting back Crimea will be a lot harder than regaining control of the Donbas, he said. The way to regain all of the lost territories is not through military actions, but economic ones, he believes. Improving the standard of living in Ukraine, and reducing corruption to massively boost government revenues, is the strategy to adopt.
“If the standard of living, the pensions level in Ukraine were to be twice as high as in Russia, we would very soon return the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk,” Sadovyi said.
“If the level were four times higher – I think we’d take back Crimea.”
