KIEV, June 23. /TASS/. Europe urges the Ukrainian authorities to implement the political provisions of the Minsk agreements, the Evropeiska Pravda Ukrainian edition said citing its own sources. According to the publication, that was the purpose of the visit to Kiev by the European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighborhood Policy Johannes Hahn last week.
"Europeans demand that we come up with a strategy for the special status for the Donbas region. This status must not be limited to three years (the way it is envisaged in the law on the status of separate territories) and be applicable on a permanent basis," first deputy head of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze said.
The newspaper’s reporter who took part in a closed discussion has cited "one of the highest-ranking officials of the European Commission": "Is Ukraine doing everything to meet the Minsk requirements? Why don’t you make a step towards granting a special status to the Donbas region? This can be done right now, displaying Kiev’s good will to implement the Minsk agreements."
The Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements signed in the Belarusian capital envisages the constitutional reform in Ukraine, whose key moment should be decentralization and "passing a permanent law on the special status for separate districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier described the situation with the implementation of the law on a special status for Donbas and the constitutional reform as "the crude violation of Kiev’s commitments under the Minsk agreements." This reform should proceed in coordination with the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. However, their representatives were not even included in the Constitutional Commission, which comprises about 15 Western experts.