MELITOPOL, November 1. /TASS/. Ukrainian authorities are preventing peaceful life in Melitopol by threatening to fire city officials who decided to work at the city's military-civilian administration, the former head of the socio-economic department of the Melitopol city council Yury Zakharchuk reported on Tuesday.
He said that after the start of the special military operation he sometimes went to see his parents and contacted one of the Zaporozhye deputy mayors and the head of the HR department of the executive committee. "They asked me to give them information about those employees who were in the city and who had transferred to the military-civilian administration. They said that they needed the information in order to terminate contracts with such employees and stop paying them salaries," the ex-official said in a video the Zaporozhye regional administration shared with TASS.
According to Zakharchuk, he then learned that the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office initiated criminal cases based on the information received from him so he stopped giving the information. "After they started writing about these people in messengers and in the media, other employees refrained from transferring to the structures of the military-civilian administration. <...> When I learned that information was being posted in the media, I realized that people could be frightened and they could receive all kinds of threats, and various dangerous things could happen to them," the former official said.
He theorized that the purpose of the Ukrainian authorities was to prevent the organization of the city administration of Melitopol. "As a result of the fact that qualified employees did not transfer to work in the structures of the military-civilian administration, the appropriate structure of services and bodies were not established, and Melitopol residents suffered from this, not being able to receive services of the right quality and amount. They did not go [to work] for fear of being prosecuted," Zakharchuk said.
In his opinion, after the power change, the city lives stably, and all structures work properly. "I wrote a letter of resignation, as I see no point in working for this structure [the Ukrainian authorities] anymore. Because they prevent the new administration from setting up new units, thereby harming the residents of the city," Zakharchuk concluded.