Russian invaders are trying to persuade the mayors of Ukrainian cities to cooperate with them. Not broken, although temporarily occupied, Melitopol (the mayor of the city Ivan Fedorov was taken prisoner for refusing to cooperate), Kherson, Energodar, Bucha.

Apparently, the aggressor believes that the mayors in Ukraine, as well as in Russia, are governors of the central government, and their decisions automatically apply to all administrative structures stationed in the city, argues Yuriy Hanushchak in the article “Communities are the stronghold of Ukraine. How decentralization cares about winning. But decentralization, which has been carried out in Ukraine for eight years, implies a clear separation of powers between the executive branch and self-government..

“The heads of the temporarily occupied communities are now in a difficult situation. On the one hand, it is necessary to ensure the vital activity of the communal sector, on the other hand, pressure begins from the occupiers to publicly fix their loyalty and remain in their positions,” the author writes.. But all attempts to plant the occupation administration are doomed to failure - for this there are neither qualified specialists nor the power support of such an administration..

In the non-occupied territory, local governments have a huge range of tools to bring victory closer. Not constrained by strict regulations of the law, the sessions of the Rada communities approve their own programs to help the army, refugees. Thanks to fiscal decentralization, the financial resource for this, although limited, is still sufficient.

“We are forced to state that in wartime, everything on the ground depends on personalities,” comments Vitaly Bezgin, head of the relevant parliamentary subcommittee on local self-government..

“Decentralization gave strong heads of communities the opportunity to make powerful organizational decisions in times of war. We see this in Novopskov, in Bucha, in Slavutich, in Novotroitsk, in the communities cut off by the occupier,” he notes..

The specificity of the current situation is that the military administrations dominate the heads of communities in the military and logistics component, but the issue of life remains on the shoulders of the heads of communities.

“In their communication, the occupiers are constantly trying to turn away local self-government from Ukraine, but apart from rare exceptions, all of it has been given to Ukraine and is fighting for it..

This is probably the best answer why decentralization strengthened the state and became an alternative to federalization, which would have destroyed the country from the inside,” Bezgin adds..

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Director of the Institute for the Development of Territories Yuriy Hanushchak tells in more detail about the types of “weapons” of the warring and temporarily occupied communities in the article “Communities are the stronghold of Ukraine. How decentralization cares about winning” in ZN. U.A..