The history of urban transport is not only a chronicle of routes and figures, but, above all, a history of engineering courage, exploration, and compromise. The early 1990s hold a special place in this chronicle. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, traditional logistics chains disappeared: the supply of reliable Czechoslovakian ? koda trolleybuses and Hungarian Ikarus buses virtually disappeared. Ukrainian cities found themselves on the brink of transport collapse.
It was during this critical moment that the Kyiv-11 was born—the first large articulated trolleybus produced in Ukraine. Created in a short timeframe at the Kyiv Electric Transport Plant (KZET), it was a bold attempt to address the shortage of domestic transport on its own. Its fate set the tone: technical shortcomings due to the new designs and a lack of funds prevented it from becoming widely used in the capital. However, it was the Kyiv-11 that laid the foundation for the entire Ukrainian trolleybus industry. Its derivatives—the shortened K-11U and their subsequent developments, the YUMZ-T1 and YUMZ-T2, manufactured at Yuzhmash in Dnipro—for years carried passenger traffic in cities across Ukraine and neighboring countries, as well as their "descendants."
This story is about cars that, despite their shortcomings, became a true symbol of their era and the first step towards the country's transport independence.