My Experiences in Ukraine and Eastern Europe

This article was originally published in the 2022 InterPlan Ukraine Special Issue. It was a "thought piece" when the Ukraine Rebuilding Action Group (URAG) was being founded.

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Project Experience in Ukraine and Vicinity

Early in my international career in environmental consulting, in the 1990s, I had the privilege of managing and supporting the $87 million USAID Environmental Policy & Technology Project (EPT) for the New Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. As a long-time staff member of CH2M Hill, the Project’s prime contractor, my duties included leading home office support to Ukraine and providing regular technical inputs and visits to our Kyiv regional office and Donetsk project office. In the Donbass region, including Donetsk and Mariupol, and in collaboration with the Donetsk Oblast environmental agency, I provided training, capacity building, and demonstration projects on environmental and waste management for the 65 most polluting industrial facilities in Donetsk, Ukraine. The EPT project also operated in Kharkiv and Lviv.

I left CH2M in 1997 and formed my own firm: Eurasia Environmental Associates, LLC. In the following years, I completed four more projects in Ukraine:

• For World Bank, we provided technical advice, training, and demonstration project design in an attempt to adpate the EU Directive for Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control to the Ukrainian context.

• For World Bank, we provided project management and environmental expertise in evaluating the technical, environmental, economic and financial feasibility of six proposed pollution prevention and control projects at three separate industrial facilities. These included a coalbed methane enterprise and two coke chemical manufacturing facilities that would be funded by the World Bank’s Donetsk Pollution Prevention and Abatement Facility.

• For US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), we conducted a Desk Study of the proposed Yalta, Ukraine Solid Waste Management Project.

• For USTDA, we conducted another Desk Study of the proposed World Bank Azov-Black Sea Biodiversity Conservation Project in Ukraine.

Over the years I have completed other projects in the New Independent States (also known as the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS), including two in Russia, one in Georgia, five in Kazakhstan, one in Tajikistan, one in Uzbekistan, and four regional projects covering the Central Asian Republics. In addition, Eurasia Environmental Associates, LLC has completed over a dozen projects in the former Soviet bloc countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I worked with USAID, USTDA, and World Bank, as well as the Asian Development Bank (ADB), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), European Union, and private companies using US Export-Import Bank financing.

Anecdotes and Lessons Learned in Ukraine

For a mid-career (and somewhat naïve) environmental professional doing some of his first international development work, this was a challenging transition with many lessons learned along the way. The amazing experiences provided a treasure trove of memories to recall and stories to tell later in life. Here are a few:

• All parties appeared to be cooperating and working toward mutual goals. We worked closely with the appropriate national and oblast environmental agencies (oblast is similar to the state level of government in the USA), but meetings and access to data were also facilitated by former intelligence officials. In Donetsk, we were aware of the large Russian population because of its proximity to the border with southern Russia. But the region also imported a sub-population of Russian managers and engineers to run some of the largest coal mines, coking facilities, and iron and steel plants in the world. It was also evident that the local mafia was heavily invested and intertwined in many aspects of Donetsk life. As I learned from local colleagues, this even included repaving the streets.

  
  

• Aiding “Transition Economy Countries” is different from aiding “Developing Countries”. There is a big difference! The officials and technical people we worked with in Ukraine and throughout the NIS were well-educated and technically proficient. Our feeling at the time was that they needed more support in project management procedures than anything else. Also, contrary to my expectations, presenting a project for public input and support could attract a large crowd of very vocal and well-informed local citizens, many of them with technical expertise. Consequently, USAID was relatively quick to “graduate” NIS countries in general from environmental aid.

• Learn to read Cyrillic, you fool! I learned the hard way that a knowledge of the language can pay off. Mr. Naive arrived at Kyiv airport with a visa written entirely in Cyrillic. Assuming everything was in order, I presented my documents but was directed to get back on the plane and return to Bonn to get a proper entry visa! I thought I had a double-entry visa that was still valid for one more visit. If I could read it, I would have known it was only a single-visit visa. To make matters worse, the Presidents of our respective countries were not on good terms at the time, so no flexibility was shown for getting a visa upon arrival. One more adventure resulting from my Cyrillic illiteracy: we filled our rental car with the wrong kind of gas at a Polish self-serve filling station! In the middle of the night between Warsaw and Poznan, my chemical engineer colleague had to siphon out biofuel and replace it with regular gas so we could get to the hotel.

• People in Ukraine are the best! We were treated with respect and hospitality everywhere we worked in Ukraine. Although I don’t support communism, I found it very informative how their “sharing economy” operated on a very individual and personal level in the transition context at that time. This raises a question: was this an expression of political economy provided top-down during Soviet times, or was this bottom-up and more culturally generated? Further, does this represent the Ukrainian culture, Russian culture, or a hybrid of the two? No matter the origin, you are seeing that sharing culture and economy on TV now. Based on my experience, Ukrainians’ pride in their country and its unique culture and history is very real.

Exhortations to Action Helping Ukraine

To our APA International Division members and other readers, especially planners from or working in Ukraine or other Eastern European or NIS countries, please feel free to write back with your own observations. Also, note that the Division is developing a working group to identify ways the Division can help out in Ukraine in the near- and longer-term. Please let us know if you’re interested and share any ideas you may have.

For example, the Division is collaborating with the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning in support of the US State Department’s Hubert Humphrey Fellows Program (also known as the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies, or SPURS). The SPURS program sends around a dozen promising, mid-career planners from overseas to study for a year at MIT. One of the ways the Division is supporting the SPURS program is by matching individual Division members to mentor individual Fellows. This year, in addition to mentoring a planner from Vietnam, I am supporting and advising a planner from Ukraine who took a year off from his duties as the planner for the city of Kharkiv to study at MIT. I am hoping I can help him in the early stages of his planning for the rebuilding of Kharkiv based on my experience working through international development projects in Ukraine.

Edited by Andy Cross