MOSCOW, May 06, /ITAR-TASS/. Ukraine will be able to find its own, unique format of a federated state but it will require political will of the central authorities, speaker of the Russian Federation Council upper parliament house Valentina Matviyenko said in an interview with the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily, which was published on its official website on Tuesday.
“Only federalism should be a natural form of statehood in Ukraine,” she said. “But Ukraine has chosen another path. Maybe, its architects thought federalism could weaken the country. I can only guess who were their advisers.”
If the Ukrainian authorities loathed to take Russia as an example they should have been oriented towards the United States with its “one of the world’s most complicated federative systems, which take into account a great number of local peculiarities,” she noted.
“Federalism in no way weakens a state but gives birth to a new uniting force inside it,” Matviyenko noted. “It reduces all the territorial difference to a common denominator, which becomes a fundamental base of the state.”
The Federation Council speaker expressed the hope that Ukraine will be able to work out its own form of a federated state. “It is only necessary to understand that today Ukraine’s society badly needs a proper form of unification and national accord. But it takes political will, first of all, of the central authorities,” she stressed.
Ukraine’s example, in her words, demonstrates how important it is to square regional interests. “Ukraine lacks it and we see the result. Russia does understand the necessity of such agreement,” she noted. “I think an optimal option for Ukraine’s development id federalization with due account of the interests and rights of regions, protection and ensuring interests of national minorities, first of all the Russian-speaking population, granting the second official language status to the Russian language.”
She noted that the number of federated states in the present-day world was growing. Federalism, in her words, was becoming a popular form of statehood. “It is not merely a latest craze, it is a call of the time. Forces that resist it bring problems and misfortune to their peoples - they do not comprehend that they are resisting the course of history, and such resistance always ends in the same way,” she said.