For villages in the Khmelnytskyi region, it is more profitable to unite in communities with each other than to be attached to the city. Photo CC BY 2.0: Serge Bystro / Flickr. Some rights reserved.The minibus that has been quietly rocking its full load of passengers, drowsy from the heat, to sleep, suddenly starts juddering.
“This isn’t our road,” Inna Abdulkadyrova, head of the Humentsi unified territorial community (OTO), hastens to announce, to deflect any questions about the state of the road. “It’s the responsibility of another council. The roads in Humentsi itself are excellent.”
The village of Humentsi, in western Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi oblast, became the centre of a new “unified territorial community” in 2015. Before its creation, Abdulkadyrova had already been elected four times as village head. After snap nationwide local elections in 2015, Abdulkadyrova’s remit widened: she is now responsible for an extra 18 villages, 245 square kilometres and 9,500 of her fellow citizens.
