Vagif Aliyev: when money is more important than human lives and the capital’s metro

This text is not about how the mayor’s office or its “predecessors” stole money from metro construction and repairs. This time I want to draw attention to the factor of the kleptomaniac appetites of individual oligarchic groups who are ready to pledge our security and common good to receive super-profits.

I have already written about problems with groundwater, in particular in Demeevka. Diggers have been making videos since 2019 that there is an emergency situation in the tunnels between Lybidskaya and VDNKh. Constant floods. They wrote about the threat to houses. The drainage system was made in violation of all standards. In many metro stations, water flows directly from the walls. For example at the station. Hippodrome!

According to the director of the Urban Institute, Alexander Sergienko, the main reason for the current flooding of tunnels on the blue line of the metro is the anthropogenic factor, that is, the structures that developers are building there. Tons of iron and concrete put pressure on the soil, which is one of the sources for the Lybid River (his comment here - from 00:56 to the end).

Experts say that the direct leak occurred at the turn from Mikhnovsky Boulevard to Lobanovsky Avenue under the DniproM and Rozetki highways. It was this tunnel that was built using a non-mechanized shield (that is, manually). Even during construction, specialists complained about the quality of work. In particular, the geometry was broken and the chemical fastening of the tunnels was unfinished. The current breakthrough occurred about 100 meters from the place (somewhere near picket 74) where the Wirth “Nadezhda” tunnel boring complex, which was digging a tunnel towards Teremki, was sunk during construction. During work on November 25, 2008, a floating vessel broke and two metro construction workers died. A wreath is still attached to the site of the tragedy in the tunnel. To dig out the “broken” shield, we had to dismantle the recently repaired pedestrian crossing.

However, there is an opinion that the point of “fragility” that provoked the leakage of the tunnel was the complex of consequences of unscheduled work on new construction sites around the stations “Lybidskaya”, “Demeyevskaya” and the floodplain of the Lybid River - the residential complex “French Quarter” by Igor Kushnir and Vadim Stolar , residential complex Salut Kushnir and Stolar on the cliff of Lake Glinka, shopping center residential complex Riverdale Vagifa Aliyeva, Riverdale residential complex by Dmitry Isaenko.

Before the war, the City Council terminated the lease agreement with the company appearing in the developer’s documents. But the owner of Ocean Mall Vagif Aliyev somehow managed to get around this ban.

Recently, Mr. Aliyev announced that he should soon open his own shopping center. Therefore, perhaps the situation with the metro was affected by intensified construction work?

As say , the same Vagif Aliyev Ocean Mall shopping center is being built not just over a metro tunnel, but directly between the Lybid River, Lake Glinka and simply on floating land (an underground allocated mass of soil - sand or sandy loam - highly saturated and thin with water, therefore so mobile, that flows like a liquid, the foundation or piles have nothing to rest on).

Even the developer seemed to admit that there were serious problems with the soils. Experts categorically did not recommend additional construction in the floodplain area. The architects publicly acknowledged the problem of the site precisely in terms of soils and the surrounding load on them. Activists protested, but Aliyev found ways to work with them.

Some of my colleagues have already told the story of the struggle for the architectural monument “Flying Saucer” house (built in 1971). This building at the station. metro station "Lybidskaya". Its authors - architects Lev Novikov and Florian Yuryev - designed the building, inspired by the work of the Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer. It was he who came up with most of the buildings for Brasilia, a new city that was being built from scratch as the future capital of the country. The owner of the Flying Saucer is the state, and the balance holder is the Ukrainian Institute of Scientific and Technical Expertise and Information (UkrINTEI), which is subordinate to the Ministry of Education. But the “Tarelka” structure itself and the stylobate part under it are leased to the Aldo company, associated with Vagif Aliyev.

In 2015, plans to build a new shopping center, Ocean Mall, on the site of the demolished cold storage plant, close to the building, and according to some plans, absorbing it. The capital authorities leased half of the UkrINTEI building, where the “plate” is located, to a private company for a period of 20 years with the right of automatic extension and reconstruction. The cultural community is drawing attention to the problem. A movement is unfolding to save it - the #savekyivmodernism initiative. In particular, the “plate” became the main location Kiev International biennale Florian Yuryev himself joined the process, writing an open letter demanding a transparent reconstruction process. In October 2020, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy included the building in the register of architectural monuments and monumental art.

During the discussion around the fate of the Flying Saucer, a lot of interesting things came to light regarding the construction of the Ocean Mall shopping center by Vagif Aliyev. In particular, the same architect Florian Yuryev pointed out that the Plate has six columns that go down. Below there is a slab, a reinforced concrete base. Lower the stove itself below the water flow. During the construction of the Plate, in order to prevent the foundation from getting wet, the plates were fenced off from groundwater. Therefore, during the construction of the structure, drainage and waterproofing were made.

Yuryev says that Vagif Aliyev, while building the shopping center, collapsed the entire earth, Leos. If the water balance is destroyed, the plate may sag. In addition, he wanted to make additional piles that would destroy the stable earthen foundation. Loess is still stable, as strong as concrete, but if it gets wet, the plate will fall.

The question arises, is it not because the metro tunnels were flooded because, while accelerating the construction of the shopping center, Vagif Aliyev’s people soaked the forest, and this soil, saturated with water, simply fell on the tunnels of the blue metro line?