100 Hryvnias Odesa City Loan

Odesa issued this note in 1997 as a municipal bond instrument — a city-level borrowing mechanism during the severe liquidity crisis that gripped Ukrainian municipalities in the mid-1990s, when the central government in Kyiv was chronically failing to transfer funds to regional administrations. Workers and pensioners were going months without wages or payments, and city councils across Ukraine turned to locally issued scrip and loan certificates as a stopgap. Odesa's issue was among the more formally produced of these, contracted out to the Canadian Bank Note Company in Ottawa rather than printed domestically.

That choice of printer is notable. CBNC had long-standing relationships with post-Soviet states seeking Western security printing during the transition period — they printed early Ukrainian national currency as well. The production quality here far exceeds the note's essentially provisional character.