How can a municipality find its sister city? Nizhyn municipality demonstrated one of the options using its own example.

In August 2022, the Embassy of Finland in Ukraine announced support for the resilience of Ukrainian society and Finland’s engagement in the reconstruction, modernization, and restoration of Ukrainian educational institutions destroyed and damaged during the war.

With this in mind, Nizhyn City Mayor Oleksandr Kodola sent an official letter to the Embassy of Ukraine in Finland with a request to assist in finding a partner city in Finland. As a result, Mrs. Ambassador helped Nizhyn establish contacts with the Imatra municipality.

As a result, the Ukrainian city of Nizhyn and the Finnish city of Imatra became twin cities.

The cooperation agreement was signed online on December 28 by the mayor of Nizhyn, Oleksandr Kodola, and the mayor of Imatra, Matias Hilden, with the participation of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to Finland, Olga Dibrova.

The official website of the Nizhyn City Council reports that the parties have agreed on cooperation in the areas of economic development, agriculture, regional development, science and technology, preventive healthcare, education, culture and art, tourism, youth and sport, social sphere, ecology and rational use of natural resources.

Imatra has already taken the first steps to help Nizhyn survive the winter period – on January 8-9, 2023, a cargo with generators, power stations, solid fuel heaters, etc. will be sent to Nizhyn.

Municipalities can establish partnership relations with foreign municipalities also with the help of the tools specially developed by MinRegion in cooperation with the international programs and projects:

• “Methodological recommendations for international municipal partnership”, created in cooperation with MinRegion and the Council of Europe Program “Decentralization and Reform of Public Administration in Ukraine”,
• E-platform “Partnership for recovery and development”, developed jointly with the Swiss-Ukrainian project “The Decentralization for Improved Democratic Education” (DECIDE) and the U-LEAD with Europe Programme.

Municipalities should also pay attention that on the e-platform it is possible to fill out an application regarding the desired cooperation with a specific foreign municipality by clicking the Cooperate button.

In March, the Ministry for Communities and Territories Development of Ukraine initiated the International Marathon of Local Self-Government, aimed at drawing the attention of the world’s municipalities to the tragedy of Ukrainian hromadas and activating the process of establishing sisterly relations.