30 October 2014
The Dnipropetrovsk City Council voted on Oct. 29 to liquidate eight district councils and their executive bodies, reported on his Facebook page Borys Filatov, the deputy head of the state oblast administration. In their place, he proposed creating two or three prefectures and said he’d present a municipal reforms proposal.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on his Facebook page on Oct. 29 that he has dismissed a total of 91 supervisors, both locally and in Kyiv, as part of the lustration process. Among those dismissed were eight generals, he reported, as well as directors of regional police stations, the Security Service Department and traffic police. He said he is continuing to develop a new personnel philosophy for the police department.
Zenon Zawada: This is the latest wave of dismissals announced by a minister since the president signed the lustration law in early October. As all the lustration declarations, this one appears encouraging but deserves deeper inquiry as to who is being dismissed in particular and on what conditions.
The decision in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, is a more concrete reform that offers more of a foundation to be optimistic. Yet the state body that poses just as many bureaucratic hurdles, if not more, is the state oblast and district administration system, which Filatov himself represents. This system serves as the representative body of the Presidential Administration in Ukraine’s oblasts and districts, which we view as unnecessary and needing significant, immediate reduction.