The overhaul of the Kharkiv highway in Kyiv, which the Kyiv City State Administration presents as a large-scale renovation of the Left Bank transport artery, turned out to be without proper permits. This was reported by "Informator" with reference to data from the portal of the Unified State Electronic System in the Sphere of Construction (UESESSB) and a statement by city activist and urban planning expert Heorhiy Mohylny.
This concerns the repair of a section of the Kharkiv highway in the Darnytsia and partially Dniprovsky districts, which officially started on October 5, 2025. The estimated cost of the work is UAH 1.26 billion. However, according to Mohylny, these works legally look like unauthorized construction.
The activist checked the information in the EUDESSB and found only one entry regarding this facility: it is not a permit, but a "refusal to issue a permit", dated October 21, 2025 - that is, after two weeks from the start of the actual work. That is, the contractors entered the facility and began overhauling before the customer received the right to carry it out.
Mohylny commented on this as follows: the city hall "is in such a hurry to squander budget money that they are even trying to get a permit after the start of construction."
This story caused a wave of recognition among Kyiv residents. In the comments to Mohylny's post, other city activists reminded that this was not the first case. In particular, Serhiy Pasyuta mentioned the overhaul of Chykalenko Street (formerly Pushkinska) in the center of the capital - according to him, there too, people entered the site without a formal construction permit.
The estimate is particularly noteworthy. At the start of the renovation, the Kyiv City State Administration announced the parameters: in 2025–2027, 5.4 km of the Kharkiv highway are to be renovated. If we compare the total amount of UAH 1.26 billion with the length of the section, it turns out more than UAH 233 million per kilometer — including the road, engineering, and supporting infrastructure. Officials remind that the last large-scale reconstruction of this highway was carried out 38 years ago, in 1987, and the highway itself was built back in 1967.
The problem is different: when a facility is being carried out as a "major overhaul", it formally requires permits and transparent procedures, because it is not about patching holes, but about interfering with the supporting structures of the street and road network. If the work is carried out without a valid permit, this opens up a whole range of questions - from the legal liability of the customer and the contractor to the quality of control over the use of funds, which are no longer measured in millions, but in hundreds of millions of hryvnias.
The scandal with the Kharkiv highway thus exposes two painful stories for Kyiv at once: prices for road repairs in the "billion" range and the practice of starting construction before formal permission.
