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Ukrainian opposition accuses authorities of anti-social reforms

"Instead of defending people, the government continues making their lives unbearable," a deputy of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada representing the Opposition Bloc party said

KIEV, August 30. /TASS/. The incumbent Ukrainian authorities have managed to make people’s life unbearable over the past two years with the aid of their reforms and having children now has become an unaffordable luxury now, Yelena Kolesnikova, a deputy of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada representing the Opposition Bloc party said on Monday.

"Instead of defending people, the government continues making their lives unbearable," she said. "What’s most abhorring, it has gotten round to children. First, it downsized the monthly benefits for small children and then scrapped them altogether."

"As the next move, the government scrapped free breakfasts at schools and free textbooks and thus reloaded this burden on to the parents," Kolesnikova said.

"Thousands of Ukrainian families are faced with a tough choice today - to feed the family, to pay up the social fees or to equip their children for a school year," she indicated.

"And where parents could possibly take the money for meals, clothes and textbooks while the government has whipped up the social fees to a half of an averaged (monthly) salary?" Kolesnikova said.

She recalled that the Opposition Bloc had registered a package of bills in the Verkhovna Rada at the beginning of the year wherein it sought to support Ukrainian families, to raise minimum wages, and to establish a moratorium on the increases of communal fees and foodstuff prices.

"One may get an impression our pseudo-reformers are doing everything they can do to make Ukrainians stop marrying and giving birth to children, as well as to turn a nation of educated people into a nation of the illiterate," she said.