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Ukraine’s law on Donbass containing many legal bombs, says prosecutor

The country’s Chief Military Prosecutor Vladimir Matios also asked the parliament to explain who would do the peacekeeping mission in Donbass

KIEV, January 18. /TASS/. The bill on reintegration of Donbass, which Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada considered two days ago in the second reading, is half-baked and contains many provisions that are impossible to translate into practice, the country’s Chief Military Prosecutor Vladimir Matios told 112 Ukraina channel.

"I know for sure this bill has so many submerged legal bombs that will bring about small cataclysms and an apocalypse for separately taken people in Donbass, in Lugansk and Donetsk," he said. "What does it mean? Small apocalypses come to these people in the form of impossibility to use these provisions in everyday life and can entail a big apocalypse."

Also, Matios asked the parliament to explain who would do the peacekeeping mission in Donbass. "From among all these 600 amendments - or as many amendments as had been filed - I couldn’t make out today who will do this [the peacekeeping]. And that’s something we believe it, that’s something we’re moving towards in the Normandy Four format."

"Experts estimate the possible size of the peacekeeping contingent at up to 30,000 military from other countries but who will do this?" he asked. "The civilian prosecutors or the deputies who are unable to get all together in the same hall?"

The Ukrainian parliament has already spent two days for the second reading of the bill ‘On Special Aspects of State Policies in Ensuring Ukraine’s Sovereignty over the Temporarily Occupied Territories in Donetsk and Lugansk Regions’.

More than the 600 amendments to the bill have been submitted but the MPs did not support a single of them, including the provision that demanded recognition of the self-proclaimed unrecognized Donetsk and Lugansk republics as terrorist organizations.

Verkhovna Rada speaker Andrei Parubiy expressed the hope the bill could be put up for voting on January 18.

The document defines the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as ‘occupied territories’ and Russia, as an ‘intruder’. Also, it officially establishes ‘Russian aggression’ as a term.

In addition, the bill rules out the mentioning of the 2014 and 2015 Minsk accords and the norms making references to them - something that President Pyotr Poroshenko insisted on earlier.

A number of Ukrainian experts have said the version of the bill put up for the first reading in th Rada had eroded the strategy conceived by Poroshenko initially.