The elected mayor of Kherson, Igor Kolykhaev, who was considered missing for a long time after being detained by the Russian military, officially received prisoner status on September 13. Kolykhaev’s son Svyatoslav told Suspilna about this.
At the same time, according to him, neither the exact location of the mayor nor his state of health is known. “I contacted the Red Cross, and they only told me that the Russian side included my father on the list of prisoners of war,” explained Svyatoslav Kolykhaev.
Igor Kolykhaev has headed the Kherson city administration since November 2020. Russian troops captured the city in March 2022. Kolykhaev remained in Kherson, despite the occupation. He said that he continued to fulfill his duty to voters. He never publicly supported the occupiers and spoke openly about the situation in the city in the media, but remained one of the few public Ukrainian officials in the occupied territories who was not kidnapped or detained by the Russian military. Later, the Russians “appointed” another mayor, which Kolykhaev did not admit. In June, the military took the mayor to an unknown location straight from his office. For a long time, Kolykhaev was considered missing.
The first deputy head of the Kherson regional council, Yuriy Sobolevsky, told how the occupation authorities in the Kherson region treated Ukrainian officials and what Kolykhaev did during the war:
In November 2022, Russian troops withdrew from the right bank of the Dnieper, leaving Kherson. Now the duties of the head of the Kherson city military administration are performed by the former deputy military prosecutor of the Southern region of Ukraine Roman Mrochko.
