USAID-Ukraine Strengthens Partnership with Eight Partner Cities on Energy Reform. On January 14, USAID-Ukraine Mission Director Jed Barton launched the USAID Municipal Energy Reform Project (MERP) ‘Introduction Workshop for the Second Group of Partner Cities’. The workshop gathered mayors, deputy mayors and energy managers from eight new MERP partner-cities: Khmelnytskyi, Kryvyi Rih, Kyiv, Lutsk, Pavlohrad, Rivne, Sumy, and Ternopil. The event introduced areas of MERP sustainable capacity building energy reform cooperation with municipalities, such as: Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SEAPs), pursuant to the EU Covenant of Mayors methodology; and Development of municipal energy management systems. Overall, MERP works with 17 cities in Ukraine. During the previous year, cooperation was launched with Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kherson, Kramatorsk, Vinnytsia and Zaporizhzhiia. Two cities, Lviv and Kamyanets-Podilskyi, are MERP associated partners, who already reached results in successful energy reform implementation.