[theme music]
David 00:02
When I was mayor of Toronto, our city faced many challenges, but they’re dwarfed in comparison to being encircled and attacked by an invading army. Yet that’s exactly what Oleksandyr Senkevych faced in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Oleksandyr Senkevych 00:21
I don’t expect this conflict to be short. I think we need to be ready for the long-term war. Because, you know, they have a lot of soldiers, tanks, and they send them to Ukraine to kill our people, to destroy our cities. So, we will defend till the last ammo. Ukrainians is the nation that’s really ready to pay their lives for freedom. So, I think we’ll stand till the last person with the Ukrainian national. [music ends]
David 00:58
[fast rhythmic music] The mayor of Mykolaiv gave this ITV interview shortly after he refused to leave his city. His family, along with millions of other Ukrainians, were forced to flee to Europe and beyond. It’s brave to hold your ground in those circumstances. But as the mayor famously declared in a viral print interview, “A captain does not leave his ship.” The suffering that Ukrainians have gone through is immense. Since Russia’s full-scale and illegal invasion began in February 2022, the UN has verified more than 62,700 civilian casualties, over 16,100 killed, while independent monitors put combined military deaths in the hundreds of thousands. [music ends]
[slow rhythmic music] This is the bloodiest conventional conflict in Europe since the Second World War, and alongside the bombs and drones, investigators have also documented widespread war crimes. As well as the human cost, the war has left deep environmental scars, which many Ukrainian officials call ecocide. The clearest example is the 2023 destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which flooded entire villages, killed dozens, and sent contaminants pouring into the Dnipro river system. But the pattern repeats on a smaller scale in places like Mykolaiv, where salt water corroding the city’s pipes was just one more frontline in a war being fought on the land itself. The conflict in Ukraine is close and personal to all of the Cities 1.5 team. As a city councillor, I represented a neighbourhood with many Ukrainian families. [music ends]
[folk music] We had a Ukrainian Day parade, Ukrainian bands, Ukrainian friends. I actually played bass drum in a Ukrainian band named Baturyn, and I had a funny moment in the Ukrainian Day parade when marching up Bloor Street in Toronto. Two Ukrainian women looked at each other and said, “I didn’t know Councillor Miller was Ukrainian.” My mom happened to be behind them, and she popped up in her British accent and said, “I’m his mother, and I didn’t know that either.” [music ends]
Our producer Jess is of Ukrainian Canadian heritage.
Jess 03:48
My paternal grandmother, who I called Bubba, passed away this December. She spoke Ukrainian on the farm that she grew up on in rural Alberta. She never really talked about what being Ukrainian meant to her, but I knew what it meant to her because you could taste it in the food that she made. She made pierogies, she made the best apple pie I’ve ever had, she made cabbage rolls. These were the ways that she expressed her heritage, being Canadian and Ukrainian at the same time.
David 04:25
[slow rhythmic music] Peggy, the writer and executive producer of the podcast, has also seen the impacts of this war firsthand.
Peggy 04:35
Back in late 2017, I spent six weeks travelling around Ukraine, and I fell in love with the people, the culture and the food. So, when the Russian invasion began, I immediately wanted to help. I assisted with the evacuation of women, children and even cat shelters. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing the war settled in Berlin, the city where I live, and several of my close friends are serving in the Ukrainian military. Over the years, I’ve heard so many personal stories, often very harrowing, but many deeply hopeful. Ukraine just feels very closely interwoven with the everyday fabric of my life. [music ends]
David 05:17
[ambient music] When we interviewed today’s guest, it was initially as part of the last ‘HOT TAKE’ on disinformation, but his story is so incredible we decided the interview deserved its own special bonus episode. Before the war, our guest was a progressive mayor known for his tech-friendly initiatives and interest in climate. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he’s known for his resilience and his insistence in not only fighting for his people, city and culture, but also for the planet. He has big plans to rebuild his city in a resilient and sustainable way, and is doing his best to stop his urban ecosystem from becoming one more victim of war. [music ends]
Oleksandyr Senkevych 06:14
[phone rings] [whooshing] My name is Oleksandyr Senkevych. I’m the mayor of Ukrainian city, Mykolaiv. We’re here in London on the London Action Climate Week, and here we are. [handset clicks]
David 06:30
Mayor, thank you very much for being with us today on Cities 1.5.
Oleksandyr Senkevych 06:35
Thank you for the invitation.
David 06:37
So, first of all, can you just give a bit of background about you as mayor and about your city?
Oleksandyr Senkevych 06:44
I was elected as a mayor in 2015 and then re-elected in 2020. Before my mayorship, I worked as an IT specialist then I created a company—an IT company, outsourcing company [for the 06:59] web development and design. After my mayorship, I started to work with the city, implementing different kinds of knowledges and the experience of other cities. Because all the cities—actually, almost all the cities are the same. They function in the same way. Sometimes we try to invent something, but it’s no need to invent you just need to make a good copy. You use success stories just to save your time and resources, because it’s all about money, people and time. So, since that time I worked as a mayor in 2020, we had a lot of plans about the city development. Our budget has grown and we found that we want to build our city connected to our past. Actually, our city is a half a million city on the south of Ukraine. Our city was the biggest shipbuilding city in the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union collapsed, we started to develop our port and that’s the second biggest port in Ukraine. We worked with bulk cargoes, actually, grain, sunflower seeds, oil, even clay. Then after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we became a ‘City Hero’. That happened because we had a couple of days after the Russian invasion to prepare our city for the assault. We started to dig trenches, prepare fortifications. Actually, we became a part of our army [on our own 08:31]. Municipal enterprises started to work under command of the army leaders. We all were preparing our city for assault. We had two days and the nearest regional city of Kherson was occupied and then they started to move forward to occupy the city of Mykolaiv. But that was a surprise for them. Our city defended itself and we got a title of ‘City Hero’ by the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I usually call our city ‘the City of Heroes’, because it’s not about the city but the people who defended it. Since that time, we lived in everyday bombardment, rocket attacks. Because they were able to attack our city easily without any notice, without any ability to prevent it, because the city of Kherson is like 45 kilometres from us. We had a joke, “If you hear the alarm, there won’t be any explosion. Because if there is an alarm, the rockets go in some other place.” Because from the launch of the rockets to the hit of the city it was a couple of minutes, so we were unable even to find out if the rocket is only visually. But in the same time, after eight months of the occupation of Kherson, Russian troops had to move back behind the Dnipro river, which is the biggest river in Ukraine, because they were unable to organise the logistics for themselves. Now, this river is the divider between temporary occupied territories and liberated territories. Meanwhile, at that time, they made a lot of bad things, including that they destroyed the pipeline which brought us fresh water from the Dnipro river. Then they exploded the hydroelectric station, which caused the floods in the region and totally destroyed our water intake. So, since the April 12th, 2022, our city lived without drinking water in our pipes until a couple of months ago. We managed to build a new pipe, which brought us fresh water from up north of the river, which our city stays on.
[rousing music] After the occupation of Kherson, our water intake was on the occupied territories. So, I made an order to drill the boreholes around the city, and first of all in medical centres, in schools and so on, and then we equipped them with the osmosis cleaning system. So, our city still, till this day, equipped with more than 260 of these water spots. We manage them, we service them, and people have to go for the clean water; take five-litre bottles and fill them with fresh water and bring them home. We say that it made us really more fit and more healthy, you know. Because people have to bring these bottles of water up to nine, 10, 15 floors. You have to bring it even in the time of blackouts, when we don’t have electricity for the elevators. You can imagine that it’s not so easy to do it. [music ends]
This is the current situation in our city. We have public transportation, we have heating, which was destroyed two years ago, centralised heating—I mean district heating in the city, which we managed to repair, and different kinds of services that you receive in your city and you think that it was always and it will be in future. People sometimes even ask us, “Why we had to wait for the bus at the bus station for 15 minutes more than it was expected on the mobile application?” Which we launched to see where is your bus.
David 12:22
Well, that last part is very normal for people in a big city.
Oleksandyr Senkevych 12:27
The war is not a reason to provide the services which they had before—with this quality that they had before the full-scale invasion, so.
David 12:37
Sounds like the impact of all these challenges from the invasion is a bit like recovering from a natural disaster or something, like the dam being bombed. Can you talk about some of the things the city’s done to recover, for example, in your energy systems?
Oleksandyr Senkevych 12:57
First of all, you’re right, you can review war not only as an act of aggression between two countries and, like, a fight for the territory, but also as a disaster. As a natural disaster like earthquakes ruin the cities, like bombs do the same, floods, which we had actually after this dam explosion, and different kind of blackouts, which can be caused by different earthquakes or tornadoes and so on. So, yes, we found that in the world there is an idea that to decrease the consumption of the resources, you need to centralise. The more centralised a system, the less resources it uses. It’s true, but in fact, it’s less resilient. The more decentralised a system, the more resilient it is. So, in our city, we found that we have—like in a district heating we have two companies, one of the company manage 93 boiler houses—different boiler houses from bigger to the ones that are situated on the roof of the buildings, and another that provides services of district heating for 40% of the city. Again, it’s a half a million city, 260 square kilometres. The city is not really condensed, it’s a wide city. So, 40% of the citizens get the service of district heating from one company with one facility, which generates the heated water for this amount of people and pump it to the big pipe, like 1.5 metre of diameter, and this amount of heat is distributed to the long range of the territories. And we found that it’s really bad. After the attack on this enterprise, we managed to finish the heating season with only one pump or something like this. So, we were able to finish it, but we started to build 18 other boiler houses to have a plan B in case of the destruction. This winter, we worked through with this centralised heating unit. But for the next winter, we will have plan B and we will use it in case of emergency.
David 15:18
Is there a role for solar in that distributed energy scheme?
Oleksandyr Senkevych 15:22
Sure. First of all, we use the solar energy to distribute the water. We built solar panels on our water treatment plant to be independent from the centralised electricity supply. And at the same time, all these water spots which I mentioned before, they’re equipped with solar panels and with the batteries. So, if we have even blackouts, like a couple of days which we had three days blackout, we were able to provide people six hours per day with the fresh water. So, they were able to come there and refill the fresh water to drink it and to cook it. So, we also use gas pistons, which is not really a clean type of electricity energy, but as a plan B it’s very useful because we managed to create an energy island which we supply with electricity from the natural gas, which we are able to generate with these gas generation units. It’s not diesel generators, they are created with a bigger efficiency. Moreover, [while in 16:28] the wintertime, we are able to get the additional heat and decrease the production of the heat in our district heating water houses. So, we have an island that provides our critical infrastructure with electricity, even at times of the long blackouts. Because Russia attacks not only our generation, but also transportation. The majority of the electricity in Ukraine is produced from the nuclear power plants. But if you are unable to transport it on the territory, you have to decrease the production because it may cause big problems. So, that’s why they decrease it and we have blackouts in different regions, in different territories, in a different time. So, just to provide people with electricity, but not the whole day.
David 17:18
[slow rhythmic music] Mayor, you’ve been very generous with your time this morning. Perhaps I just finally ask you, you’ve been very active in Ukrainian association of cities in the Global Covenant of Mayors. You’ve come to events that we at C40 have hosted. You’ve mentioned learning lessons from other cities so that you don’t make the same mistakes; you take the best ideas and implement them at home. [music ends]
Any advice for your colleagues from your experience as mayor of a city that’s suffered incredible challenges but has shown great resilience in its response, both from the government and from the residents of the city?
Oleksandyr Senkevych 18:05
Even in times of war, we are collecting data in the city, putting it online, or let’s say make it digital, and we analyse it. We analyse everything: garbage collection, people registration, water pollution, water leaks, and so on, so on. So, I think that to build a transport system many years ago you had to order the university to create a modern transportation model for you. Today, having this data of how many people you have on the streets and how they move around the city, you are able to do this work in five minutes. You only need the data, the basic thing in your city. So, first of all, decentralisation is the key to resilience. Second, analyse and collect and put in digital all the data. We do it actually on the frontline and with our military personnel and so on. The wars are also digital.
David 19:08
Excellent advice. Mayor, I know all my colleagues at C40 wish you the very best indeed for success, and let’s all hope this invasion can be brought to an end sooner rather than later.
Oleksandyr Senkevych 19:22
Thank you. Thank you and I hope to see you soon in peaceful Ukraine in the city of Mykolaiv. You are very welcome.
David 19:28
Slava Ukraini.
Oleksandyr Senkevych 19:29
Heroiam slava!
David 19:31
[theme music] The city of Mykolaiv endured near daily bombardment for eight months straight in 2022 without ever falling, losing 37 people in a single strike on its regional administration building and going years without a functional water system after Russian forces severed the pipeline feeding the city. But despite these incredible hardships, the people of Mykolaiv and its mayor are showing the rest of us what true resilience looks like. This city’s resilience in the face of outside aggression happens to also create resilience in the face of climate impacts, lessons that are applicable globally.
[fast rhythmic music] Thanks for listening. You’ll be hearing from us in the fall when we return with a special miniseries. In the meantime, keep your eyes and ears on our feed as there may be some surprises between now and October to keep you updated on what climate heroes around the world are doing to protect both people and planet. You won’t want to miss it. [music ends]
