Bridges

Last Monday, seven children (aged six to 16) were injured, one seriously, from an explosion in a playground in Pashena Balka, a village in the centre-east part of Ukraine. It is unclear whether the blast came from a misguided missile or if the kids were playing with an unexploded ordnance they had found. This tragic story barely warranted news coverage in this war-battered region, as such events have now become prosaic.

Pashena Balka is about an hour away from where Olga Havrylenko presides as mayor in Petrykivka, part of the Dnipropetrovsk region. Nearly every day there are fresh reports of gunfire in, or around, her administrative region near the Dnieper River. Some days it is just pot shots at a patrol convoy surveying an uneasy ceasefire. Other days it is heavy machine gun fire from dug-in positions.

“My region is in a state of war,” Havrylenko explained to County council at Shire Hall on Thursday. It is the context in which she lives. And governs. It likely wasn’t her intention to paint such a stark divide between her experience and that of her hosts, yet nor could it be left unsaid.

Havrylenko was among 16 Ukrainian mayors who visited the County last week. At least three of whom preside in districts at risk of violent outbreaks of war. Despite the uncertainty of day-to-day existence in parts of that country and, perhaps, because of the brutal hardships they have endured in their tragic history, Havrylenko and her fellow municipal leaders project a quiet confidence about the future of their country.

Only three decades have passed since Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In 2013, protests against pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych led to his downfall, and left as many as 9,000 dead from the resulting conflict.

Two years later, a package of reforms led to decentralizing powers from Kiev to the regions— pushing power from the state centre down to elected officials in the region. To do this required the subsequent amalgamation of about 11,000 village councils to about 1,500 regional councils.

The mayors who visited the County last week are among this new cohort.

They came to the County because there are similarities in the size and number of communities involved in the amalgamation.

They came to learn—about amalgamation, the challenges and opportunities, and about local economic development. Long a statecentred function, each of the regions is working to define and promote their competencies in, and attractiveness to, industry, tourism and value-added agriculture.

They explained, for example, that agriculture producers have had no experience in processing their goods in order to generate the higher return available to value-added producers. This was done by the state, somewhere else. Local initiatives to create co-operative processing facilities have struggled to get off the ground due to uncertainty and general wariness. Only time and positive experience will reduce this guardedness.

Yet the most recurring concern expressed by virtually each of the visiting mayors was the poor condition of infrastructure—particularly roads—which, they say, greatly discourages investment in the region. It is the biggest impediment to local economic development, as industry clings to the large urban centres and even those residents yearning for a rural lifestyle won’t venture too far, or risk isolation.

Poor roads and a broken funding model are items to which County council members could easily relate.

But in other ways they were worlds apart. One of the mayors pointed to a millennium of history of Ukraine, much of it marred by tragedy. Generation after generation having endured oppression, they are now beginning to understand that their input was being heard.

As many as seven million Ukrainians may have starved to death in 1932 under Stalin’s vindictive orders— many of them from the Dnipropetrovsk region Mayor Havrylenko now serves. They talked about a sense of emerging from a colonial past.

So as such exercises aim to do, these two days in July served as means to consider the world beyond the geographic and cultural frames with which we tend to focus. It was an opportunity for elected officials and others—in a time when the value of democracy is under attack—to share experiences. To build bridges.

There was enormous value for everyone who participated. We know this to be true because our Ukraine guests told us so—with an optimism that was pure and uncontrived.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca