Ukraine’s acting President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that he is removing from office the elected Mayor of Odesa Gennadiy Trukhanov, and appointing his own replacement. However, Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov stated that he will remain mayor unless the Odesa City Council votes to dismiss him from his elected post.
Trukhanov had earned the displeasure of the Russophobes in 2022, for refusing to demolish a monument of Empress Catherine II, the 18th century Russian empress, who initiated the construction of the city of Odesa. (The statue had been removed once before, by the Bolsheviks in 1920.) A petition had actually called for removing the statue and erecting one for an American pornographic actor, Billy Herrington.
Mayor Trukhanov’s refusal to remove the statue of Catherine was cited as evidence in a second petition, one sent to Zelenskyy, and which claimed that Trukhanov “actively demonstrates his loyalty to the invaders.” But in October 2022, Zelenskyy, then the elected President, said that he did not have “the constitutional powers” to deal with the “removal from the post for which he was elected” or depriving Trukhanov “of Ukrainian citizenship.” He turned the matter over to Ukraine’s SBU security and Ministry of Internal Affairs.
