President's Office of Ukraine considers dismissing Klitschko

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may soon remove Vitalii Klitschko from the office of the head of the Kyiv City State Administration. Under such circumstances, Klitschko will still remain the mayor of Kyiv.

Source: sources from the teams of Zelesnkyy and Klitschko

Details: After the tragedy with the closed bomb shelter in Kyiv, the President’s Office of Ukraine considers Oleksandr Kamyshin, the Minister of Strategic Industries, as the new head of the Kyiv City State Administration.

"Kamyshin is getting ready for this decision; he has been meeting with Kuleba [Oleksii Kuleba is responsible for regional policy – ed.] for a few weeks," revealed one of the anonymous top officials to Ukrainska Pravda.

Sources from the team of Vitalii Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, replied this to a question about the dismissal of Klitschko: "We have not been informed yet".

At the same time, sources from the team of Zelenskyy explain that so far there has been no final decision about the dismissal of Klitschko and the appointment of the new head of the Kyiv City State Administration.

Ukrainska Pravda has been trying to contact Oleksii Kuleba, deputy head of the President’s Office of Ukraine, who is responsible for regional policy, yet Kuleba only read the messages and ignored them.

It should be mentioned that the President’s Office has been considering dismissing Klitschko from the office of the Head of the Kyiv City State Administration since 2019. This time the issue was aggravated by the scandal with the closed bomb shelter in Kyiv.

It was Kamyshin to whom Zelenskyy delegated the revision of all bomb shelters in Kyiv after the tragedy.

Kamyshin himself has not commented on the rumours about his supposed appointment.

Meanwhile, as a minister, he has no right to combine this job with the office in the administration. So in case he is appointed, Kamyshin must first be dismissed from the government by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (Ukrainian parliament).

The sources in the leadership of the Ukrainian government report that there have been no appeals for the dismissal of Kamyshin in the parliament.

According to the Constitution of Ukraine, the head of the Kyiv City State Administration is appointed by the President of Ukraine, but in 2003 the Constitutional Court issued an explanation to this article, in which it is stated that only a person who has been chosen by the residents of Kyiv as their mayor can be appointed to this office.

The city of Kyiv has the special status of being the capital of Ukraine, so it is regulated by separate legislative provisions, mainly by the law "About the capital of Ukraine – City-Hero Kyiv."

In 2019, the MPs from the Sluha Narodu (Servant of the People) fraction submitted a bill, which provides for making changes to the acting law, to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.

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