Happy New Year from the State of Kyiv newsletter!
Here’s what got us talking this past week.
Cool news:
- The number of new daily coronavirus cases has decreased in Ukraine. At least, according to the official stats. This past week the daily new registered cases were on average fluctuating between four and eight thousand people, which is considerably less than the days when Ukraine had around 15 thousand new cases every day.
- Ukrainian Daria Bilodid has been declared the world’s best female judoka by the International Judo Federation.
- Western Ukraine’s first ever liver transplantation operation took place in Lviv.
- Two Ukrainian women and seven children were released from the Roj refugee camp in northeastern Syria and returned to Ukraine.
- The first clocks showing a countdown to the arrival of the next metro train – as opposed to how long it’s been since the previous train left – have been installed on the Kontraktova Ploshcha metro station in Kyiv. It is expected that all Kyiv metro stations will get these monitors by the end of 2021.
Uncool news:
- This past week the weather outside in Kyiv was not frightful… as abnormally high air temperatures were registered all week with some days being as warm as +10 degrees Celsius. It is projected that January 2021 will on average be 2-2.5 degrees warmer than previous years’.
- 10 members of the election committee in Lviv, western Ukraine are facing up to six years in prison after the police uncovered that they were involved in falsifying protocols for counting votes during the second round of mayoral elections in the city.
- Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky has completed the list of finalists compiled by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) as those promoting organized crime and corruption. The report states that Kolomosiky via his then asset Privatbank loaned out more than $5 billion “to himself with no collateral.” The money seemed to have disappeared into a series of offshores without being fully traced to this day. Additionally, the Ministry of Justice of the US has brought forward new accusations against Kolomoisky.
- The President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy had dismissed the head of the constitutional court Oleksandr Tupytskyi, but the court refuses to carry out the decision.
- A group of Ukrainian tourists had fallen through a frozen lake in the Polish mountains. Nobody was injured as the Ukrainians managed to get back to safety themselves.