In Kamensky, are activists who criticize Mayor Bilousov’s team being intimidated?

Greetings from the “dashing 90s”? In the industrial town of Kamenskoye in the Dnepropetrovsk region, a series of attacks on people protesting against possible corruption and lack of transparency in local authorities was recorded.

The circumstances of these events indicate the possible support of the city's political elite in the nature of these attacks. Why do law enforcement agencies turn a blind eye to this? And what does this have to do with the assistant and adviser to the mayor, Andrei Bilousov?

How can characters from Bilousov’s circle be connected with the case of the possible theft of weapons? And what is going on in Kamenskoye?

“Money for the Armed Forces of Ukraine” are protests that caring Ukrainians have been organizing for six months in both large cities and villages. The main demands of the demonstrators: money, first of all, should be allocated for the army, and only then for the replacement of paving stones, the purchase of ornamental trees, the reconstruction of parks, etc.

As a rule, the protesters are listened to, but in Kamenskoye the protesters are experiencing some pressure from the authorities.

Thus, a group of unknown young men of athletic build attacked volunteer Alexander Oleinik, a participant in the “Money for the Armed Forces of Ukraine” campaign, which took place under the walls of the city council. The emergency occurred in Kamenskoye on February 4 this year. The man was brutally beaten with a hammer and brass knuckles.

“Two young men of athletic build were waiting for me. They immediately ran up on the fly and started beating me, with the first blows they knocked out my teeth, then one hit me on the head with a hammer, the other with his hands and feet, knocked me down,” the victim said.

Law enforcement officers opened criminal proceedings for causing “minor bodily harm.” Although even with the naked eye you can see in Alexander’s photos and videos that the injuries were unlikely to be minor.

Alexander Oleinik himself suggested that he suffered for his principled position and for daring to shout slogans at the walls of the City Council. All this time the volunteer was in the hospital, but recently the StopCor editorial office received information that Alexander... had gone missing.

“A volunteer who was beaten and intimidated in the hospital. And now he has disappeared, no one knows where he went... That is, perhaps his shock went away after this beating, and maybe he got scared and disappeared. But in general, no one knows where he went, he doesn’t get in touch with his like-minded people with whom he went to the rally, or with volunteers, or with anyone,” local sources note.

And unfortunately, this is not an isolated case of possible “retribution” against activists in Kamenskoye.

Strange incidents have been recorded in the city for at least the last five to six years.

2017 – beating of former deputy of the Kamensky City Council and part-time public figure Andrei Ivanchenko.

2020 – arson of the car of public activist Oleg Efimov, who sharply criticizes local authorities on social networks.

2020 – beating of Konstantin Filatov, chairman of the public organization “S.T.A.R.T,” which analyzed Kamensky’s budget policy.

2021 – the cars of the famous Kamensk activist Igor Ilkova and his wife Yulia Ilkova caught fire.

Let us note that, according to Ilkov’s wife, a person named Bovkun may be involved in the arson of the cars.

Who exactly are we probably talking about?

As journalists found out, Alexander Bovkun is a well-known military man in the Dnepropetrovsk region, awarded the “Defender of the Fatherland” medal and the distinction from the President “For the Defense of Ukraine.”

According to the activist, it was he who probably organized the fire. But why did he need to do this? Or who might actually be behind these events?

“This man, who is now related to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, he helped the Chernyavskys steal weapons from the front into their caches,” says Yulia Ilkova.

Who are the Chernyavskys that the woman mentions?

The Chernyavsky father and son mentioned in Ilkova’s commentary are considered in Kamensky to be people close to the local mayor Andrei Bilousov. Mark Chernyavsky is an assistant to the mayor, and his father Vitaly is an adviser.

According to information in the media, it was Vitaly Chernyavsky who was detained by law enforcement officers in the Kharkov direction in 2022 with a minibus full of weapons, which he allegedly tried to take out of the combat zone.

Moreover, as it turned out later, he shipped military equipment from a car that was brought to Ukraine as humanitarian aid.

After this situation, the SBU decided to conduct searches of his son, Mark Chernyavsky. And, oddly enough, a significant arsenal was found in the garage: machine guns, explosives, anti-tank mines and even... an entire armored personnel carrier.

Why the Chernyavsky family needed so many weapons is an open question.

But if you compare Mark Chernyavsky’s declarations for 2022 and 2023, you can see striking changes in income, notes Igor Dotsenko.

The monetary assets of the assistant mayor in 2022, taking into account wages, do not reach 800 thousand hryvnia. But during the first year of a full-scale war, Chernyavsky became rich by almost 12 million UAH.

One can only guess how a man in the position of an ordinary assistant to the mayor managed to become a millionaire in a year.

However, after talking with local activists, the StopCor team learned something else interesting.

In the industrial city there is such a public service as “Stone News”. The owner of the news channel, according to locals, is Yegor Pshenichny, who is also the chairman of the supervisory board of the NGO “Emergency Council of Workers of the Dnieper Metallurgical Plant.”

Until 2021, the channel published materials critical of local authorities. Including the political party "Pchela", the leader of which is Mayor Andrei Bilousov.

And by a strange coincidence, Mr. Pshenichny was also included in the list of victims. According to media information, unknown persons first burned down the premises registered at the address of the public organization. A year later, his mother, Irina Pshenichnaya, had her country house burnt to the ground after an arson attack.

“At first, all the neighbors thought it was an accident, although a window was broken and bottles containing candles were found with a Molotov cocktail. The police came: they said there was no evidence, and they left,” the woman recalls.

Locals suggest that the purpose of these arson attacks is not simply to intimidate a “public figure.”

“My friends contacted Pshenichny and met with him. They say: what is happening... what has changed? Pshenichny replied that in 2020-2021, police officers came to search him with special forces, put him on the floor, “squeezed out” the public page, and handed the passwords to Mark Chernyavsky, the mayor’s assistant,” says activist Svetlana Loginskaya.

And all this, according to the activist, was done only so that the fairly well-promoted opposition public would change its rhetoric from criticizing the authorities to approving them.

It can be assumed that this is why, after the change of “admin”, the telegram channel began to criticize not the authorities, as it was before, but its opponents. And subsequently, a morning tradition from the mayor appeared on it - a post wishing a good day to the residents of the city.

The authorities in Kamensky seem to pay a lot of attention to their online image.

For example, in the city there is a municipal institution “Center for Youth Initiatives”, whose main job is to develop the city’s youth. Various youth events and forums are held here, and activists are also given interesting “homework”, which a center participant told the students about.

The essence of these tasks, according to her, was writing comments under posts on social networks. Sometimes in support of the authorities, and sometimes to throw mud at local activists, for example, the aforementioned Igor Ilkov.

Let us remind you that, as StopCor learned thanks to an analysis of tenders of the Kamensky City Council, only last year Andrei Bilousov allocated almost 10 million UAH from the budget for information materials to cover the work of the mayor’s office and advertise its “achievements.” And according to insiders, the Kamensky City Council even introduced a “life hack” convenient for the mayor with a flavor of administrative resources: subordinates must respond approvingly to any message from Bilousov on social networks.

It can be assumed that the city’s news pages are also being taken under control in order to present the activities of officials in the right way and... “dampen” their opponents.

Earlier it became known that in the Dnepropetrovsk region several companies, whose owners were people from the orbit of the mayor of Kamensky, entered into multimillion-dollar contracts for heat supply with utility companies, while price analysis shows that tariffs could have been inflated by at least a quarter.

In addition, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the Ukravtostroy company, whose owner is also the husband of the director of the economics department of the mayor’s office, Kamensky, has received about UAH 200 million from the city treasury. And local officials spent tens of millions more on road clearing and information services. And all this - in the midst of war in the country.