Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree terminating the Ukrainian citizenship of Odesa mayor Hennadiy Trukhanov, who had led the city since May 2014. The decision was announced after Zelensky’s October 14 meeting with SBU chief Vasyl Maliuk, where they discussed the situation in southern Ukraine and in Odesa.
The president said the possession of Russian citizenship by several individuals had been confirmed. According to sources cited by BBC Ukrainian and RBC-Ukraine, Trukhanov was the main target of the move, which automatically cost him his post. The same decree also stripped former lawmaker Oleg Tsaryov and ballet dancer Sergei Polunin of Ukrainian citizenship.
On the evening of October 14, the SBU published a copy of a Russian foreign passport that it said had been issued to Trukhanov on December 15, 2015. The agency also said he had a Russian tax identification number and cited documents indicating that the cancellation of his internal Russian passport did not mean the loss of Russian citizenship.
That same day, Zelensky ordered the creation of a city military administration in Odesa, headed by Serhiy Lysak. Political analyst Anatoliy Boyko told Suspilne that such a structure could effectively weaken local self-government and concentrate budget authority in the hands of a single official.
Trukhanov rejected the accusations. He said that since 2014 he had repeatedly undergone checks, and that in 2018 Russia’s Interior Ministry had told NABU it had no record of him receiving Russian citizenship. The mayor called the passport image published by the SBU a forgery and a provocation.
“I do not have and have never had Russian citizenship,” Trukhanov said, adding that he was prepared to challenge the decision in a Ukrainian court and, if necessary, at the ECHR.
The Insider and Bellingcat investigator Christo Grozev also described the published foreign passport as fake, citing a mismatched number, an error in the transliteration of his name, and no evidence of Trukhanov traveling to Russia after 2014. Following the presidential decision, protests were held in Odesa and a petition calling for the mayor’s citizenship to be revoked gathered more than 28,000 signatures.