MOSCOW, May 15. /TASS/. The purposeful destruction of the infrastructure in southeastern Ukraine attests to the fact that the authorities in Kiev don’t regard it as their region, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolay Azarov told the Rossiya-24 TV channel.
"The lion’s share of GDP was created in the southeast of Ukraine, the lion’s share of the budget revenue used to be collected in the southeastern regions and was redistributed to the subsidized regions," Azarov said. According to him, Ukraine had 21 subsidized regions. "If Kiev subsidized Donbas, then a simple question arises: at the expense of what region? At the expense of Ivano-Frankovsk or Ternopol? Of course not," the former prime minister said.
"The fact that they [the Ukrainian authorities] are destroying the southeastern regions using artillery and the Grad rocket launchers means that they don’t consider it their region," he noted.
Ukraine’s Premier Arseniy Yatsenyuk earlier told various media outlets that Donbas was a subsidized region with its budget in the red.
Nikolay Azarov headed Ukraine’s government between March 11, 2010, and January 28, 2014.