ODESSA, December 11, (ITAR-TASS). Ukraine’s President and government should take the most resolute steps towards stabilizing the situation in the country, says a statement issued by Nikolai Skorik, the governor of the southeast Odessa region
“Opposition activists’ protest activity and appeals frustrate adoption of the state budget for 2014 and shows graphically that the oppositionists do not give a damn about the people of Ukraine, in whose name they allegedly speak out,” Skorik says. “Practical actions under many nationwide social programs will be endangered now and local budgets will be paralyzed.”
“Payments of pensions, student grants, and wages may be disrupted and all of this will become a reality if the President and government don’t take resolute steps,” the statement says.
Odessa region governor indicates that there can be no justification to encroachments on the law and everyone who has committed these encroachments should be punished.
“Ukrainian citizens alone have the right to determine their country’s future, partly through the utilization of their right to peaceful protests,” Skorik says. “Ukrainian people doesn’t confine to the handful of individuals expressing their viewpoints on Independence Square /the Maidan/ in Kiev and the authorities have a duty to act in the interests of the majority.”
“If it is necessary to maintain normal economic relations with Russia so that the workers of Ukrainian industries could have jobs and the workers could get their pay so as to buy food for their families, then the authorities must do it,” the statement says.
Along with it, a responsible popular government should obstruct the decay of the economy, destruction of national manufacturers, the winding up of social programs, and the redundancies of millions of people, Skorik says.
It is the people that has the prerogative to decide on whether or not the government’s course is correct and this should be done exclusively in the format of law, the law on elections in the first place.
Violent demonstrations in Kiev with demands for President Yanukovich and the cabinet of Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov to resign have failed to evoke amassed support among the residents of Odessa, a city of a multi-ethnic multicultural city where the population has high education rates and the economy is science-intensive.
In the first five days of protests in Kiev, slightly more than a hundred people including occasional passers-by and newsmen would gather daily by the monument to Cardinal-Duke de Richelieu, the founder of this city, but these actions have waned away by now.