Poroshenko rules out special status for Donbas
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has ruled out the
possibility of Ukraine’s troubled Donbas getting a special status.
The draft constitution "does not envisage a special
status for Donbas," he said during a working trip to the western Ukrainian
city of Lviv, reports Tass.
"There will be no federalization," he went on.
"Ukraine has been and will remain a unitary state," the president
said.
Constitutional reform is one of the basic demands in the
Minsk Package of Measures for the settlement in Ukraine, approved by the
Normandy Four leaders and signed by the parties in the conflict in Minsk on
February 12.
In line with the document, Ukraine must before the end of
2015 adopt a new constitution envisaging as a key element decentralization
(with due regard for specific features of certain areas of the Donetsk and
Lugansk regions, coordinated with representatives of these regions). The second
important requirement is that the special status of separate districts of the
Donetsk and Lugansk regions should be fixed permanently in Ukraine’s new
constitution.
On Monday, July 27, draft amendments went to the
Constitutional Court of Ukraine.
However, Donbas representatives said that the submitted to
the Constitutional Court amendments drafted by the administration of Ukrainian
President Pyotr Poroshenko were at variance with the Minsk principles.
Kiev should include the guarantees of a special status in
the main text of the Constitution, not in any transitional provisions, they
say. "The political privileges of the Donbas region must be enshrined in
the Constitution. This concerns, above all, the relations with Kiev on the
basis of mutually-advantageous treaties and agreements. We will never agree to
something less," head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic
(LPR) Igor Plotnitsky said.
Normandy Four leaders have repeatedly emphasized a need to
comply with all points in the political section of the Package of Measures.
"In particular, it is important to reach progress as to the scheduled for
autumn local elections, as well as the status of the separatists-controlled
regions," Christiane Wirtz, deputy spokesperson of the German government,
said after their telephone conversation last week.
"The Russian president called on the Ukrainian side to
follow the letter and spirit of the Minsk Complex of Measures, in particular,
to agree with the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and to adopt
permanent legislation on the special status of corresponding areas and an
amnesty law, as well as to determine modalities and procedures for conducting
local elections," the Kremlin press service said then.
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