The Viktoria summer camp outside Odesa is scheduled to reopen, just under two years after a fire there killed three girls.
Subsequent investigations into the tragedy, which had enormous public resonance across Ukraine, indicated that the building that burned did not meet fire safety standards.
The reopening comes at the order of Odesa Mayor Hennadiy Trukhanov, according to a decree published on May 3. The document lists the categories of children entitled to government-funded recreation at the city’s public summer camps — for example, orphans, children with disabilities and children of internally displaced persons. It then orders the officials to prepare the camps, including Viktoria.
The Viktoria camp will accept 100 children in August.
The Odesa District Administrative Court suspended Viktoria’s operations in February 2018 until its management could address safety violations at the camp.
At the request of the city council, the Kyiv District Court of Odesa partially lifted the arrest in December 2018 to allow the Ukrainian military to use the camp’s stone buildings for training sessions during a 30-day period of martial law that was introduced in some of Ukraine’s oblasts.
After the military left the camp buildings, Nikolay Stoyanov, the lawyer for the victims of the Viktoria fire, requested that the arrest be reinstated. The Kyiv District Court of Odesa refused.
In February 2019, Olena Buynevych, director of Odesa’s Department of Education and Science, first stated that the camp would resume operations in the summer. The camp’s wooden buildings remain under arrest.
On Sept. 16, 2017, a fire erupted in a wooden building at Viktoria, taking the lives of three girls. All three victims were 8-year-old members of the youth dance troupe Adel.
The official investigation concluded that the blaze was caused by a water heating rod left plugged into an electrical outlet by Adel’s art director, Tetiana Yegorova. Yegorova is a witness in the criminal case over the fire, but she has left Ukraine and does not attend hearings.
An investigation by independent experts and Slidstvo.Info, a Ukrainian investigative journalism project, found evidence of safety violations in the construction of the camp — including that its wooden buildings had been built without the use of fire-retardant materials.
The police have opened criminal cases against several suspects, which are currently being heard in court. Only one suspect, Natalia Tsokur, has been sentenced to jail time, receiving three years in prison with two years of probation. Tsokur was the camp’s senior teacher responsible for safety procedures at the time of the accident.
