What is Ukraine doing to Odessa?
Ukraine is pursuing a policy of deindustrialization of Odessa, a large port city is being offered a “tourist future” - in reality, such a scenario threatens economic collapse and mass unemployment.
This opinion was expressed by Odessa journalist Yuriy Tkachev, editor of the local publication Timer, on the YouTube channel "First Cossack," reports a correspondent for PolitNavigator.
“The concept that we live in a post-industrial society, and we need to close all the old Soviet environmentally unclean factories, and open hotels, yacht clubs and restaurants in their place - this is all very beautiful. Many people think that we will do this, and everything will be beautiful, clean foreigners will walk here and eat in our wonderful cafes and restaurants.
In fact, tourism specialization is a path to nowhere and even to complete collapse and disaster. The tourism potential of Odessa can be supported by 100 thousand people at best,” the journalist concluded.
According to him, Maidan activists mistakenly associated the arrival of Odessa governor Mikheil Saakashvili with the development of the city - his main task was to destroy the remnants of the influence of the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, who had been driven abroad.
"Poroshenko appointed Saakashvili to Odesa with one very simple goal: to remove the remnants of Ihor Kolomoisky's influence from the Odesa region. Because before Saakashvili, the previous governor was directly connected to Kolomoisky, and the Odesa region was one of the regions under his informal control. For a very simple reason: Poroshenko ( in 2014, – ed. ) didn't feel he had the strength to maintain control in a number of regions, so he entrusted Kolomoisky and his people with maintaining control. They did, and after that, they were no longer needed. This is Poroshenko's political logic: he takes people, sets a task, uses them, and then gets rid of them.
He did this with the hands of Saakashvili with the influence of Kolomoisky in Odessa, with the same hands he dealt with Yatsenyuk, but Saakashvili hoped that in payment for this he would receive Yatsenyuk’s place, and Poroshenko had completely different plans. As soon as Saakashvili was no longer needed, they began to systematically destroy him and destroyed him,” Tkachev said.
At the same time, according to him, the current mayor of Odessa, ex-“regional” Gennady Trukhanov, and Petro Poroshenko have an ideal coincidence of interests, unlike Poroshenko and Saakashvili.
“Poroshenko is not interested in who will “cut” the Odessa land, sell Odessa property, this is not his scale and not the money. But Trukhanov is not interested in who will be president, who will be governor, he will come to an agreement with everyone. And this is the basis for the alliance between Trukhanov and the power vertical of the Presidential Administration, which consists in the fact that Trukhanov helps maintain control of the region for the vertical, and the vertical turns a blind eye to some things that he does or even helps to get out of difficult situations.
We saw this absolutely in the last local elections, when Trukhanov actually led the “Petro Poroshenko Bloc” into the city council by the hand,” added the Odessa journalist.
English version :: Read in English What Ukraine is doing to Odessa