The Odesa Oblast Military Administration refused to disclose the sums spent on the top officials’ and staff’s business trips abroad taken during the martial law period to Nikcenter journalists, saying that preparing a response to their query would “require significant intellectual effort” and claiming that the requested data was not public information, Nikcenter reports.
The team was asking about officials’ trips abroad and the budget money spent for them in December 2025 for their upcoming news story.
On 12 January 2026, the Odesa OMA responded by refusing to provide any information, claiming that only “represented and documented” information that does not require “additional analytical work” could be provided upon request.
The administration added that fulfilling the request under martial law could have harmful consequences, because some of the Odesa Oblast Administration’s top officials are “servicepeople in the Security Service of Ukraine, and one of them was a serviceman in the Ukrainian Armed Forces in 2022–2023.”
The response did not explain what harm disclosing the data on officials’ business trips abroad could cause.
Volodymyr Zelenchuk, a lawyer at the Institute of Mass Information who reviewed the query and the response, believes that the Odesa Oblast Administration withheld public information from the journalists unlawfully.
“The information requested by journalists does not necessitate production of any new content, as it is reflected in the documents ordering the business trips, which are mandatory staffing paperwork. Even if journalists did not request the documents themselves (ideally), copying the requested information from the documents into the query response does not require “analysis, additional analytical work, additional justification” or even “significant intellectual effort.” The OMA’s arguments in denying that data on business trips is public information directly contradict established judicial practice,” the lawyer believes.
Earlier, the Odesa OMA refused to share the list of persons who were nominated for state awards during the war with Nikcenter journalists, calling the news outlet’s queries “paperwork terrorism.”