Viktor Anuškevičius

Viktor Anuškevičius was the two-term mayor of Ivano-Frankivsk who spent nearly a decade shaping the city's public face, its international friendships and its memory culture. Born on 15 November 1962 in Vorkuta, in the Komi ASSR of the Soviet Union, he came from a Ukrainian-Lithuanian family. His father, a Lithuanian from near Kaunas, had been exiled to the far north; after the exile ended the family resettled in Shepetivka in Khmelnytskyi Oblast, his mother's home region. There he finished school and a technical college and worked as a milling-machine operator before earning an engineering degree at the Vinnytsia Polytechnic Institute in 1986.

After army service he moved in 1988 to Ivano-Frankivsk, the Galician city that would become his life's work. For almost a decade he served as a design engineer at the local wood combine. In 1991, as Ukraine opened to private enterprise, he founded the cooperative Ritas and entered the city's emerging business community. Politics followed: in 2002 he won a seat on the Ivano-Frankivsk city council on the Our Ukraine bloc, later chairing the council's control commission on privatisation and lease of communal property. In 2005 he became head of the oblast organisation of the Ukrainian People's Party.

In March 2006 voters chose him as city mayor with about half the ballots cast. He was re-elected in December 2010, again under the Ukrainian People's Party banner, and served until 1 December 2015. Colleagues and later successors remembered those years for an energetic push to widen the city's foreign partnerships, for investments in roads, kindergartens and energy efficiency, and for a deliberate programme of historical monuments. Under his mayoralty Ivano-Frankivsk raised monuments to Stepan Bandera, Yevhen Konovalets, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and King Danylo of Galicia, anchoring national memory in the streetscape. He also chaired the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast Football Federation from 2006 to 2013, keeping sport tied to civic life.

Lithuania and Poland both honoured that cross-border work. In 2006 he received the Order for Merits to Lithuania, presented during celebrations of the city's founding anniversary by Lithuania's ambassador to Ukraine. In 2013 Poland awarded him the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland at the opening of the Centre for Polish Culture and European Dialogue in Ivano-Frankivsk. Civic monitors noticed him too: the OPORA publicity index named him Ukraine's most public mayor. Between 2012 and 2013 he hosted the documentary series Frankivske Prykarpattia, bringing regional history to local screens. In 2010 he completed a master's degree in public administration at the National Academy of Public Administration under the President of Ukraine.

He was not without conflict. In 2008 a cross-faction council vote of no confidence failed to overcome his veto. During Euromaidan he took a hard public line against Viktor Yanukovych's government and later said his family had faced threats. After leaving the mayor's office he briefly returned as a city councillor before resigning in 2018. Current mayor Ruslan Martsinkiv, who had served nearly two years as city council secretary under Anuškevičius, recalled that they often saw the city's future differently yet shared a love for Frankivsk and a wish to improve it.

Anuškevičius died on 15 September 2026 at the age of 63. Martsinkiv announced the loss publicly, thanked him on behalf of the community for work done for the city, and offered condolences to his wife Lidiya, relatives, friends and colleagues. A panakhyda was set for 16 September and the funeral for 17 September at the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in Ivano-Frankivsk. The cause of death was not publicly confirmed in the first reports. He leaves a record of a mayor who tied a post-Soviet industrial city to European partners, to football, and to a visible pantheon of Ukrainian historical figures.