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The mayor of Kherson had money, power, and that which all politicians strive for: to be more loved than hated.
Since 2020, he ran the city on the banks of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine, territory marked by fertile agricultural lands that stretched down to the Crimean Peninsula.
But when the Russians invaded last February and, within days, seized control of Kherson, Igor Kolykhaev lost it all — his wealth, his power, his liberty and even, in some quarters, his reputation.
On March 6, in Kyiv, the capital, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a decree recognizing Kherson as a “hero city,” in accordance with Soviet tradition. And Kolykhaev, along with other mayors of occupied cities, was cited for courage and “personal contribution to the protection of state sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
On that same day, 650 kilometres away, Kolykhaev was visited by a delegation headed by a colonel with the FSB, Russia’s federal security service.
“They asked Igor Victorovich to come over to their side,” Andrey Kreysa, Kolykhaev’s personal bodyguard, told the Star from Odesa, referring to Kolykhaev by his first name and patronymic, a sign of respect.
“He enjoyed the support of a large percentage of the population. His level of authority was high, and it was important that Igor Victorovich went over to their side. But what did he say to them? ‘I can’t do it. I am Ukrainian. If I go over to your side, it is treason to the homeland.’ ”
Despite the rebuke, Kolykhaev remained a free man in an occupied land for nearly four months. During this time, he tried to manage the city’s strained and dwindling resources. The essential and unsexy parts of politics. Ensuring clean drinking water, tidy streets and timely public transport.
This, and the wartime task of distributing humanitarian aid and ensuring access to essential medicines.
“For me, the most important thing is to save lives,” he said in an interview last April, days after Moscow appointed a new mayor and municipal administration.
He noted that he had requested and was awaiting instructions from Kyiv about how to carry on and what directions to give city employees serving the estimated 200,000 people who were unable to leave Kherson.
“There’s nowhere to go to. There’s no humanitarian corridor,” he said. “We need to know what to do so that the status of ‘hostage’ does not become the status of ‘collaborator.’ ”
Kolykhaev recognized that by ensuring city services in occupied territory, he walked a fine line between patriot and pariah.
Then, on June 28, the Russians decided they had had enough of Kolykhaev’s parallel city government.
That morning, he was met at his impromptu offices by Russian armed guards wearing masks, according to Kreyza and a Facebook post written that day by Galina Lyashevskaya, a mayoral aide.
“They seized hard drives from computers, opened all the safes, searched for documents. All this time, Kolykhaev was kept in a separate office in handcuffs under armed guard,” Lyashevskaya wrote. “After the search, Kolykhaev was put on a bus and taken away.”
Kreyza, who was also arrested, along with three other city officials, said that the Russians took anything they thought had monetary or intelligence value.
Tensions had been heightened ahead of the arrest. A pro-Russian collaborator running a city department had been killed in a car bomb attack attributed to Ukrainian partisans on June 24.
And Lyashevskaya noted that Kolykhaev had refused to meet his Moscow-appointed replacement, Vladimir Saldo. Saldo, a former Kherson mayor and longtime city councillor, had sent a letter several days prior inviting Kolykhaev to meet and discuss potential co-operation with the Russians.
Announcing Kolykhaev’s fate in a Telegram video, Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the occupying administration, accused him of preventing children from attending Russian-run schools, preventing the distribution of medicines and preventing the “denazification process” that has been presented as the raison d’etre for the Russian invasion.
“He presented himself as someone who built something and made millions, but he gave the people kopeks,” said Stremousov, appearing with a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin on the wall behind him and a portrait of Cuban revolutionary Ernesto (Che) Guevara to his left.
“Finally, he was neutralized.” A neutralization that resulted not in death but in detention.
Kolykhaev, who has been in captivity for nearly seven months, is not the first Ukrainian mayor to have been arrested.
Russian forces have targeted political, military and law enforcement officials in conquered Ukrainian territories and set up checkpoints or “filtration camps” for civilian populations fleeing war.
Last month, Kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko, the head of the Association of Ukrainian Cities, said 30 mayors had been arrested by Russian forces in the last year.
Ivan Fydorov was one of them. The mayor of Melitopol, a southern city about halfway between Kherson and Mariupol, was abducted last March, held for a week and released in exchange for nine captured Russian soldiers.
His release was hailed by Zelenskyy, and Fyodorov has since become a sort of international spokesperson for the war effort. He was immediately dispatched last spring to speak in numerous European capitals, including a Vatican meeting with Pope Francis. This week, he spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Kherson was liberated from Russian occupation on Nov. 11. Zelenskyy travelled there to celebrate the retreat, which he referred to as “the beginning of the end of the war.”
But freedom for the city has not translated into freedom for its mayor.
In fact, the plight of Kolykhaev and the other mayors in Russian captivity has been met with a strange and troubling silence — one that Kolykhaev’s family, friends and allies are now determined to break.
“I was silent before. I was waiting, we were waiting for the government’s help,” said Svyatoslav Kolykhaev, the mayor’s 21-year-old son.
Svyatoslav and his mother left Kherson last May.
Kolykhaev, knowing the dangers, stayed behind. He had a city to run. He was also concerned about the fate of his lucrative agricultural business.
“He told me so many times that he could be captured any day,” Svyatoslav Kolykhaev said. “When we were leaving the city with my mom, we wanted to leave some stuff with him, valuable stuff, because the Russians wouldn’t let us leave with it. He told us, ‘Don’t leave anything with me because they can come at any time.’ ”
The last time he spoke with his father was a day before the abduction. They spoke about Svyatoslav’s university studies in Paris. They spoke about life. The subject that truly weighed on their minds — the Russian occupation — was too dangerous to broach.
Since, he has been counting the days and trying to advocate for his father’s release from afar.
Svyatoslav Kolykhaev launched an online petition in November to bring attention to his father’s captivity.
He wrote to Ukraine’s Human Rights Council urging authorities to seek a prisoner exchange.
There was a glimmer of hope last week when the Russian and Ukraine human rights commissioners met in Turkey to discuss a larger-scale exchange, but it has since been dashed.
“I don’t see any point to wait now,” he said of his reasons for speaking out.
The only news of Kolykhaev’s whereabouts and condition come from those who have crossed his path in captivity. And the news is not good.
Natalia Gavrilenka was arrested by Russian forces on July 7 for providing food, clothing, armour and logistical support to a partisan unit in Kherson. One member of the secret group reported their activities to the Russians.
They were taken to a holding facility in Kherson, where the news circulated that Kolykhaev, whose offices were located next to Gavrilenka’s home, was among the prisoners.
But the mayor was little more than gossip in that first location. Kolykhaev was held in a separate cell, alone. Some people caught a glimpse of him when he was being led through the halls, always accompanied by guards.
Kreyza, Kolykhaev’s own bodyguard, recounted the harsh conditions of their detention.
They were fed once a day, in the mornings, and always the same thing: buckwheat porridge.
Prisoners were also mistreated during interrogations.
“They kicked, they punched, they beat us with batons,” said Kreyza. “They broke two of my ribs.”
Women were spared the physical mistreatment, but he psychological burden was still great, said Gavrilenka.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen from one minute to the next … They come and collect you and take everything away. Freedom. Rights. You have nothing left, and your life is in the hands of someone who took you from your house at gunpoint.”
Kreyza was released from captivity in late August and fled Kherson for Odesa in September. The Russians were trying to recruit locals to fight the impending Ukrainian counter-offensive aimed at retaking the city.
As that battle approached, the Russians moved their detainees, and Gavrilenka found herself in the same vehicle as Kolykhaev. The former neighbours were together again.
“He had lost weight,” she said. “He was half the size he had been before he was imprisoned.”
His hair was also more grey and longer than before.
“He looked like he had aged.”
At the next stop, a facility in Hola Prystan, Ukraine, they were able to talk and walk in the yard of the detention facility. She said Kolykhaev traded some food for a warm blanket.
It was the end of October when 35 prisoners were moved again. From Hola Prystan, she said, they were transported toward Novotroitske, but Kolykhaev and eight other men were inexplicably divided from the others and taken to a police station in Kalanchak.
The latest information about Kolykhaev dates from late December, according to his son. He was still in detention in the Kherson region, somewhere near the Russian-controlled territory of Crimea. The reports are that he is suffering from ill-treatment, malnourishment and some sort of medical problem that affects his lungs or breathing.
But not all of Kherson’s residents are sympathetic, or willing to believe these accounts.
Missiles and shells continue to rain down on the liberated city from Russian-held positions south of the river. Anger and mistrust are rampant.
Every single day brings news of a new case brought by the Kherson Region Prosecutor’s office against those who collaborated with the occupying forces.
There are academics, hospital administrators, educators, bureaucrats.
And questions have been raised about the mayor, too — a man who, with his business interests and political power, had more to lose than most.
Quietly, in comments on social media, some have noted that Kolykhaev, a native Russian speaker, was educated at a naval academy in St. Petersburg before returning to Ukraine and launching into business.
They ask how it was possible that the Russian occupiers allowed him to circulate more or less freely in the months between their storming of Kherson and his eventual arrest. Others say he should have fled the city at the first opportunity and continued co-ordinating support for Kherson residents from a distance.
And they question whether he is not in prison but in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, safe, sound and at liberty behind enemy lines.
Svyatoslav Kolykhaev has heard all the rumours, all innuendo, all the suspicions.
He presents photographs of destroyed farm machines and the shell-punched walls of buildings that housed a once-thriving farm business to silence those whispering that his father was somehow working with the Russians to stave off financial ruin.
“First, there is no evidence. Second, if he was a collaborator he wouldn’t be in prison now … and I would have stayed with him and wouldn’t be in Europe,” Svyatoslav Kolykhaev said.
“If they provide the evidence, they have to allow him to defend himself — to communicate and give answers. But for now they are not even trying to get him back.”
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