Anatoliy Bondarenko

Anatoliy Bondarenko is the mayor of Cherkasy; he was first elected in 2015, and in 2020 he made it to the second round together with IT businessman Viktor Yevpak.Bondarenko began his political career in the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, but in the summer of 2020 he left Yulia Tymoshenko's party for Borys Filatov's project "Proposition". He did not stay there long, however, and soon moved to the ranks of For the Future, the party of oligarch Kolomoisky's associates. It was from this political force that Anatoliy Bondarenko ran for mayor.Bondarenko gained nationwide popularity in the spring of 2020, when he publicly opposed the lockdown and incurred the wrath of Interior Minister Avakov and President Zelenskyy. The president called Bondarenko a "bandit" and stated that he was involved in 19 criminal cases.