BY MICHAEL WASIURA IN ODESA, UKRAINE
In recent weeks, protesters across Ukraine have been gathering to demand that local and regional governments reorient their budgets away from municipal projects and instead dedicate as much money as possible to the country's war effort. On September 27 in the largely Russian speaking, southern port city of Odesa, a crowd numbering in the low hundreds gathered in an attempt to persuade their city council to cancel plans to rehabilitate a district courthouse and instead put the money towards the purchase of drones and tourniquets for local units fighting on the front.
"For as long as the war lasts, we want all of the money which our government spends to go towards necessities," Katerina Nozhevnikova, founder of the charitable fund "Korporatsia Monstrov" (Monsters Inc.), told Newsweek. "When your house is on fire, you don't buy new curtains, you buy a fire extinguisher."
The protest movement, which began in Odesa, has begun to spread throughout the country.
"After we started coming out on the street, more than ten other cities followed," Nozhevnikova said. "This isn't only an Odesa problem. It's a problem for all of Ukraine, unfortunately."
While the Wednesday morning gathering attracted a comparatively small crowd, weekend rallies regularly attract more than 1000 participants. The crowd largely consists of those whose family members either are or were fighting on the front.
Their signs included:
"All money to the Armed Forces of Ukraine!"
"We need drones!!! Not reconstruction"
"Reconstruction after Victory!"
"We are not against the authorities, we are for the Armed Forces of Ukraine"
"Children need a living father! Money to the Armed Forces of Ukraine!"
A handful of local widows gathered holding portraits of their fallen husbands.
Today's protest, which was held on the square between Odesa's Opera House and its City Hall, coincided with a vote concerning the city budget.
"People are against tenders for expanding the courthouse or buying a New Year's tree when that money could be spent on outfitting our guys in order to increase the chances that they come back alive," Ksenia Kobalchinska, a regional deputy who was attending the Odesa City Council meeting as an observer, told Newsweek.
"We don't have enough tourniquets for our loved ones out there fighting for us, and until we do, people are going to demand that we hold off on repairing our roads," she explained. "We can fix the roads after we win the war."
Inside the city council itself, an argument arose between mayor Gennady Trukhanov and a local activist. The activist, stating his case in Russian, called for several proposed tenders to be canceled in order to free up funds for the purchase of military kit. Trukhanov, answering in Ukrainian as best he could, took the position that, as a mayor, he did not possess the legal authority to procure supplies for the military.
Before the heated session ended, a vote was held on a proposal to cancel the allocation of 10 million hryvnia ($270,551 ) that had previously been approved for construction of a new courthouse building this year, part of a project budgeted to cost a total of 106 million hryvnia ($2,867,840). It received 20 "yes" votes to 0 "no" votes, but with 21 deputies choosing not to cast a ballot either way, the measure failed to reach the threshold necessary to overturn the authorization of the construction funds.