"The largest land scam in Kyiv's history." How land near the "Pirogov" museum ended up in the hands of developers.

On the southern outskirts of Kyiv lies the largest open-air museum in Europe - the National Museum of Folk Architecture and Life in Pirogovo. The museum grounds feature 300 monuments, the oldest of which dates back to 1587.

Imagine modern buildings towering over authentic Ukrainian huts. Air conditioners mounted on ventilated facades beside a wooden church from Transcarpathia. Traditional folk songs during celebrations are drowned out by the roar of car engines.

This scenario could have become a reality a decade ago. In 2007, the Kyiv City Council allocated hundreds of hectares of fields and forests around Pirogovo and Feofania for residential development. At that time, Leonid Chernovetsky was the mayor, and the secretary of the Kyiv Council was the most well-known member of his "young team," Oles Dovhyi.

It later turned out that the main beneficiaries of this decision were businessmen Vasyl Khmelnytsky and Andriy Ivanov. At that time, the partners owned assets in real estate, energy, and banking sectors: they held stakes in companies such as "Kyivgas," "Kyivvodokanal," "Kyivenergo," "Kyivkhlib," UDP, and the bank "Kreshchatyk."

The local deputies' decision immediately raised legal questions from the community and law enforcement. The issue was that land designated for agricultural use was taken out of state ownership and handed over to new owners for development entirely free of charge.

Prosecutors managed to invalidate the decision made by the Kyiv deputies. However, the businessmen did not abandon their hopes of developing the vast plots on the city's outskirts and attempted to reclaim this right through the courts. They succeeded in part.

Khmelnytsky and Ivanov attracted influential partners and, with renewed vigor, began another phase of their fight for valuable land. The businessmen had already invested millions of dollars into the project and were determined to recoup their expenses at any cost.

Student Landlords

During the Soviet occupation, the size of Kyiv was much smaller. The outskirts of the city, free from construction and infrastructure, were allocated to collective farms for agricultural use. The Khotiv collective farm had the right to perpetual use of vast areas of land near the villages of Khotiv and Pirogovo.

With the collapse of the USSR, the collective farms disbanded. In the 1990s, the ruins of the Khotiv collective farm were used to create a collective agricultural enterprise of the same name (KSP). Some plots were divided among farmers, while others were transferred to communal ownership of the Kyiv community. KSP "Khotivsky" rented communal lands.

Eventually, KSP was reorganized into a limited liability agricultural society (SGOOO). The enterprise continued to engage in agribusiness, leading the Kyiv Council to extend its lease on land parcels totaling 1,000 hectares for 25 years in 2004.

After a few years, the co-owners of "Khotivsky" unexpectedly decided to relinquish a significant portion of the leased lands, allegedly due to high land tax rates. At the same time, the Kyiv City Council received requests from student cooperatives for assistance with housing issues and to transfer to them, ordinary individuals "from the street," part of the land previously cultivated by "Khotivsky," solely for development.

Despite the fact that the co-founders of each of these cooperatives consisted of a small number of people, the Kyiv Council generously allocated them dozens of hectares. For instance, the housing cooperative "Zhitlodar" received almost 100 hectares near Feofania, "Osviityanyn" - nearly 110 hectares near Pirogovo, "Kharcmoshivets" - over 100 hectares in Koncha-Zaspa, and "Tarasovets" - 42 hectares on Akademika Zabolotnoho Street.

Lawyer of the "Kyiv Ecological-Cultural Center" and activist Oleksandr Dyadyuk describes the Kyiv Council meeting on October 1, 2007, as "the largest land fraud in Kyiv, executed all at once." At that time, the deputies waited until late at night when the public and journalists grew weary of following the session. There was no television broadcast.

Director of the analytical-research center "Institute of the City" Oleksandr Serhiyenko recalls that the agenda for the session announced 709 questions, of which 644 were related to land. There were no draft resolutions for 448 of them.

"The deputies voted on draft resolutions based solely on titles read aloud by the secretary of the Kyiv Council, Oles Dovhyi," - Serhiyenko wrote in an article for "Mirror of the Week."

According to Dyadyuk, the founders of the cooperatives were nominal owners, students who, for a reward of 50-200 UAH, submitted applications for land allocation and signed notarized powers of attorney for actions with the land. As former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko later noted, the police interviewed 118 students out of 450 who participated in this scheme. They confessed to fraud.

Poor Businessman with a Rich Past

Konstantin Panchenko was a co-founder of 9 out of 17 housing construction cooperatives, which collectively received over 1,500 hectares. He owned the law firm "Formula of Security," managed by former head of the Main Department of Communal Property of the capital and former deputy of the Kyiv Council Anatoliy Chub.

Chub was part of the supervisory boards of several enterprises controlled by people's deputy Khmelnytsky and Kyiv Council deputy Ivanov. As former journalist Tatyana Chornovol noted, 70% of the "land" decisions of the Kyiv Council on October 1, 2007, were made in the interests of Khmelnytsky's business empire.

The allocation of land to cooperatives was preceded by an order from then-Minister of Culture and Tourism Yuriy Bohutsky "On the Adjustment of Protection Zones of the National Museum of Folk Architecture and Life of Ukraine" (a copy is available to EP). It was published a month before the infamous "night" session of the Kyiv Council.