MOSCOW, April 23. /TASS/. Donbas will not endorse Ukraine’s constitution if Kiev authorities amend the document without discussing it with Donetsk and Luhansk, the parliamentary speaker of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Andrei Purgin, said on Thursday.
Purgin stressed that the work on agreeing the amendments to the constitution needs to be launched as part of the Minsk Contact Group. "If Ukraine changes the constitution unilaterally, Donbas will not consider that such changes are in accordance with the Minsk agreements," the speaker was quoted by the Donetsk news agency as saying.
"Ukraine’s unilateral actions on changing the constitution once again show that Kiev is not going to implement the Minsk agreements and the decisions of the heads of states of the Normandy Four," he said.
Purgin said Donbas has already asked Ukraine’s chief of the constitutional commission Vladimir Groisman to synchronize actions on political settlement and developing a format of cooperation of the constitutional commissions of Ukraine and Donbas. "But we were not heard," he said.
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian parliament press service said the members of a working group of the country’s constitutional commission were due to prepare an agreed text of the draft law on changes to the constitution by May 13.
Purgin reminded that under point 11 of the package of measures on implementing the Minsk agreements, Ukraine is committed to coordinate the changes to constitution with the representatives of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics.
"The Kiev authorities are cynically imitating the process of resolving the conflict in Donbas. In fact, Kiev’s actions come to ask the whole world for weapons and invite military instructors to train its army. Kiev is placing its stake on the solution of the conflict by force," he said.