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- Ukraine’s Constitutional Court rules draft decentralization amendments are constitutional
- Expert calls Ukraine Constitutional Court's meeting on new amendments mere formality
- Ukraine’s Constitutional Court finds no violations in Donbas status constitution provision
MOSCOW, August 31. /TASS/. The constitutional changes adopted by Ukraine’s parliament in the first reading on Monday have nothing to do with the Minsk agreements and will not help to settle the crisis in Donbas, DPR’s negotiator Denis Pushilin has said.
Kiev claims that the so-called decentralization bill proposed by President Petro Poroshenko is intended to give the eastern region a special status, as demanded by the Minsk agreements reached on February 12 in the Belarusian capital.
"We do not recognize what is going on now in the Rada as we know for sure that the amendments proposed by Poroshenko are just an imitation of the Minsk agreements implementation," Pushilin said.
The self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics have repeatedly said that the local elections cannot be unilateral and must be agreed with the Donbas representatives, he reminded.
The vote on Donbas should be transparent and fair and carried out under control of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), Pushilin said.
Donbas is expected to hand over its constitutional amendments on Tuesday at the meeting of the working subgroup on political issues, Pushilin said. "We hope that this time, the position of Donbas will be heard, although the chances are slim," he added.