KIEV, May 31. /TASS/. Nothing good can be expected from Georgian ex-president Mikhail Saakashvili’s appointment as governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region, a Ukrainian lawmaker said on Sunday.
"Odessa have seen various governors and now - a former Georgian president," Vitaly Barvinenko said, adding that Kiev seemed to deliberately appoint people far from regional politics to govern Ukrainian regions. "By the way, after Saakashvili’s appointment it looked like he did not discriminate between the posts of the region governor and the Odessa mayor," he said.
The situation in Ukrainian regions, according to Barvinenko, is being aggravated by the conflict between the president and the prime minister who have been unable to reach an agreement on candidates for heads of regional administrations for over a year.
"The solution, as usual, is obvious - it will suffice to conduct a promised constitutional reform and decentralization, to wind up regional and district administrations and refer their competences to executive committees of local legislatures. It means to remove ‘supervisors’ from Kiev allow local legislatures to elect executive heads by themselves. After such reform, they will be answerable to local communities but not to the chiefs from Kiev," the lawmaker said.
"Creeping Georgianization of the Ukrainian politics in the recent months has yielded no positive results," Barvinenko said. "Georgian specialists is a myth imposed on Ukraine. Neither of the reforms they promised has been realized over all this time. Just look at the situation in public health and the activity of Alexander Kvtashvili [Ukraine’s minister of health] and it will be enough to say goodbye to any illusions."
"Personnel experiments in such strategically important region as Odessa will bring no good," he added.
On May 30, Ukraine’s President Pyotr Poroshenko appointed Georgian ex-President Mikhail Saakashvili head of the Odessa region state administration.