"None of our partners raised this issue": Zelenskyy on not signing the urban planning law

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that he vetoed a controversial bill adopted by the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament), which would have reformed urban planning, for his own reasons, not because any international partners advised him to.

Source: Zelenskyy at his end-of-year press conference

Quote from Zelenskyy: "Regarding the law on developers and so on, no one has ever contacted me personally and asked me not to sign it. So this is my personal choice, and there are reasons. No one from the European Union, the United States or the G7 has ever raised this issue."

Background: Bill No. 5655, which was considered to have advanced the interests of developers, was met with hostility from the public.

In December 2022, a petition demanding that the urban development reform bill be vetoed gained the required number of signatures in record time.

Furthermore, according to the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, numerous innovations in the law are aimed at eliminating any effective developer liability for unauthorised construction.

The draft law drew scathing criticism from the Verkhovna Rada’s Main Legal Department. Parliamentary lawyers expressly pointed out that "the provisions of the bill are not consistent with the norms of the Constitution and laws of Ukraine". The law was strongly opposed by the Association of Cities of Ukraine. Thirty-nine mayors submitted a personal joint statement against the so-called urban planning reform.

The adopted law arrived at the President’s Office on 19 December 2022, and the President did not veto it within the prescribed 15-day period. At a press conference in the summer, he stated that he could not veto it because the deadline had expired, and expressed a desire to meet with the heads of hromadas who are for and against the bill to figure out the issue [a hromada is an administrative unit designating a village, several villages, or a town, and their adjacent territories - ed.].

In a resolution passed on 16 June in support of Ukraine's fast-track NATO membership, the European Parliament called on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy not to sign the controversial urban planning reform bill.

In November, the European Commission recommended in a report on EU enlargement policy that Ukraine veto Law No. 5655 on Urban Planning Reform.

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