MOSCOW, October 3. /TASS/. Bill on reintegration of Donbass the Ukrainian MPs plan to put up for discussion in the Verkhovna Rada makes the prospects of peace settlement in the war-torn areas of eastern Ukraine still more distant, the plenipotentiary representative of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Denis Pushilin said on Monday.
"Quite frequently, President Pyotr Poroshenko is compelled to make excuses in front of his Western partners or at any rate to imitate activity of some sort and it’s not rules out he will try to pass this law off as implementation of the Minsk accords when he demonstrates it," Pushilin said.
"Still, if you analyze the full set of measures [on implementation of the Minsk accords] then we can see they haven’t fulfilled anything, just anything," Pushilin said.
He indicated that the Kiev decision-makers had not discussed the new bill with representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics. "Unfortunately, this makes the prospects for a peaceful solution to the conflict still more distant," he said.
Ukrainian authorities are currently designing a bill that they have titled ‘On the Special Aspects of State Policy toward Restoration of State Sovereignty over the Temporarily Occupied Territories of the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions of Ukraine’, aka the bill ‘On Reintegration of Donbass’. It introduces the term ‘provisionally occupied territories’ as regards the Donetsk and Lugansk republics and expands the powers of the president to throw army units into the conflict.
Artur Gerasimov, the chief of the Pyotr Poroshenko Bloc caucus in the Verkhovna Rada, the law on reintegration has been finalized and may be submitted to parliament on October 4.
"We’ve held all the consultations and have taken all the decisions and legal finalization is underway now," he said.
A number of deputies have expressed discontent, however, as they have not seen the text of the document.