Mykolaiv City Council has not shown the faces of its deputies for two months to confirm their presence at online sessions

The Mykolaiv City Council has not shown the faces of its deputies for two months as a confirmation of their personal presence at the meetings of the sessions, which have been held via video conferencing for the fourth year in a row.

This is evidenced by the recordings of the broadcasts of the sessions for June, July and August 2025, according to NikVesti.

It is worth noting that since the beginning of the full-scale war, the deputies of the Mykolaiv City Council have never gathered in the session hall to hold their meetings. Instead, all sessions are held via Zoom conferences, which are broadcast on the YouTube channel of the Mykolaiv City Council.

Traditionally, at the beginning of the meeting, the mayor of Mykolaiv, Oleksandr Sienkevych, calls on the deputies to turn on their cameras to make sure that they are the ones participating in the meeting. At the same time, viewers saw a Zoom conference screen with the faces of the deputies.

Screenshot of the broadcast of the session of the Mykolaiv City Council on 3 June 2025

However, the mayor's office changed its approach and now only the speaker's face is displayed on the broadcast screen. Therefore, in the recordings of the sessions held on 26 June, 17 July, 31 July and 28 August, it is impossible to verify that the meeting is actually attended by deputies, except for those who speak and actively participate in the session. Consequently, it is also impossible to check whether the required number of MPs is actually present for the session.

This is how the screen of the video broadcast of the sessions has looked like for 2 months now, when the mayor Oleksandr Senkevych asks the deputies to turn on the camera to confirm their participation, a screen from the city council video

Director of the Anti-Corruption Department of Mykolaiv City Council Andrii Yermolaiev, who is also a deputy from the party «Proposal», in a comment to NikVesti, said that he did not see the faces of all city council members in the Zoom conference during the session on 28 August, despite requests to turn on the cameras to confirm their participation in the meeting. At the same time, information about possible non-personal voting during the consideration of several draft decisions is being discussed among the deputies, said Andrii Yermolaiev.

«You know, if it is remote, there is always the possibility of some kind of fraud. I saw that at the beginning of the session they said that everyone should turn on the camera. And since I was also in Zoom, but it doesn't show everyone, I didn't see everyone. I believe that we have an information department that is responsible for holding sessions, they had to make sure that all MPs were present... If they missed something and said that all MPs were confirmed, but in fact they were not, it is criminal liability. This is a very big precedent, because then, during all these years of remote voting, if the decision is on the verge, as here 28 votes, it can be appealed. If at least one such fact is confirmed, it will call into question all three years of the council's work. In the digital world, nothing happens without leaving a trace. If there are such suspicions, I think law enforcement agencies will quickly figure out which IP addresses were used. If someone is planning to muck something up, they have very little understanding of it. If the law enforcement agencies are willing, they will find out very quickly,» said Andrii Yermolaiev.

We tried to get a comment from Yevhen Bohachenko, the head of the city's information and computer centre responsible for organising online meetings of city council sessions, on how the personal participation of deputies in the meetings is confirmed, but as of the time of publication of this material, he did not respond to our calls and messages.

Earlier, the mayor of Mykolaiv, Oleksandr Sienkevych, admitted that he wanted to win «Oscar for publicity» and promised to open the so-called staff meetings he holds with his subordinates to journalists. At the same time, the mayor repeatedly declares at every public event and meeting that everything is done transparently and openly in Mykolaiv City Council. The editorial board of the online media NikVesti has officially submitted a proposal to the draft decision on the City Council's Integrity Plan to correct this and help Oleksandr Sienkevych to lead the openness rating.

Proposals of NikVesti to the Integrity Plan on the participation of deputies in online sessions

As it is known, Tetiana Dombrovska, a deputy of the Mykolaiv City Council from the «Servant of the People» party, said she did not support the draft decision «On streamlining the structure of the Mykolaiv City Council and its executive bodies» (s-dz-001), which was adopted at the session on 28 August. At the same time, the minutes of the session indicate her vote as «for». It should be noted that according to the minutes, 28 MPs voted in favour of the draft law. It is possible that if Dombrovska's vote is withdrawn, the decision will probably be declared unacceptable. Earlier it was reported that the deputies of Mykolaiv City Council approved the updated structure of the executive bodies of the city hall.

In the spring, deputy Olena Kiseliova (faction «European Solidarity»), who heads the Legality Commission, was not allowed to participate because her signature in Zoom did not match. She notes that she was not warned about the changes in the connection procedure. At the same time, she believes that the Mykolaiv City Council should abandon the practice of holding online sessions, as it has been doing for three years.

Hello! I am Kateryna Sereda, the author of this article.

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