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Ukraine’s inflation hits 20-year high — opposition lawmaker

Ukraine’s Opposition Bloc insists on the government’s urgent measures to index wages and pensions

KIEV, May 7. /TASS/. Ukraine’s inflation measured from April 2014 to April 2015 hit a 20-year high, Opposition Bloc lawmaker Natalia Korolevskaya said on Thursday.

"Annual inflation exceeded the 20-year high in April 2015, reaching 60.9% In 1996, consumer prices grew by 39.7%," the lawmaker said.

"The prices of goods and services are now growing at a pace that has not been registered in the past 20 years. At the same time, the authorities forget indexing wages and pensions. Millions of people will be pushed far beyond the poverty line without immediate indexation and hundreds of thousands of them will simply be unable to survive," the deputy said.

In the past twenty years, Ukrainians forgot about the poverty and hyperinflation of the 1990s but "the current authorities have reminded them of that, actually putting them in a time machine to revisit those years," the lawmaker said.

"But now, with over a million of internally displaced persons [as a result of the war in east Ukraine] and current housing and utility charges, their plight may be graver," she said.

Ukraine’s Opposition Bloc insists on the government’s urgent measures to index wages and pensions, the lawmaker said.