MOSCOW, May 13. /ITAR-TASS/. Following Sunday’s referendum on the future of the Donetsk region, the authorities of the Donetsk People’s Republic will roll up their sleeves to resolve the social and economic tasks the region is faced with and they will take up the problem of organizing its Armed Forces, Denis Pushilin, the co-chairman of the DPR says in an interview published Tuesday by the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.
“A de facto civil war is being waged on our territory,” he says. “There are many military bases here and we should decide on what’s to be done about their contingents. They either change over to our side or else they are declared occupation troops, which makes them subject to expulsion.”
Pushilin indicates that active work with the military is underway now and “there are many encouraging signals in return.”
Among the social and economic tasks, which the DPR will have to untangle in the first place, he named pensions and the salaries in the budget-receiving sector in the Donetsk Coalfields area.
“We still have some monies left, as Kiev remitted some amounts,” Pushilin says. “As for now, we’ll have to see. We’ll continue using the hrivna for the time being but a switch-over to some other monetary unit is unavoidable in the future.”
Also, the authorities plan to set up new agencies of state power. All of these steps will be take “over the shortest possible term.”
He mentions the operations of industrial facilities located in the region, saying they are working as usual. “For the most part, the industries here are oriented at Russia and the Eurasian Customs Union countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia) and it would be totally irrational to break these ties up,” Pushilin says.
He confirms the intention of the DPR authorities to appeal to the UN for a recognition of the republic as a sovereign state.
“We are planning an appeal to the UN for declaring us a sovereign state but we don’t hope to get a positive answer, frankly speaking, because the West’s position towards us,” Pushilin says. “The West’s stance towards us is all too obvious but we won’t be particularly upset either because we know only too well what we were embarking on.”
May 11, people in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine voted in referendums on the status of their regions. The electoral commissions there said almost 80% registered voters had come to the polls amid the continuing punitive operation led by the Armed Forces, paramilitaries of the ‘national guard’ and rightwing radical militants.
The referendums were held in the wake of formation of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republic, which were declared in April.
As a result of Sunday’s polling, 89.7% residents in Donetsk and 96.2% residents in Lugansk voted in favor of independence.