MOSCOW, February 26. /ITAR-TASS/. Speaker of Federation Council upper house of parliament Valentina Matviyenko finds an initiative to grant Russian citizenship to Ukrainians with Russian roots untimely.

“This bill is untimely, [we] should not give signals and reasons for reproaches. We are interested in preserving Ukraine’s statehood,” the parliament speaker told reporters, adding that “in this respect, this issue is not topical yet, we should think it over.”

Deputies from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and the Communists have earlier submitted several bills to the State Duma lower house of parliament, envisaging easier rules for receiving Russian citizenship by Ukrainians.

So, LDPR deputy Ilya Drozdov proposes to facilitate the procedure “to receive Russian citizenship by Ukrainian citizens of Russian origin and members of their families confirming Russian nationality, if an ancestor of direct ascending line  was a Russian native by birth.”

The bill holds that Russian citizenship “can be conveyed, including from grandmothers and grandfathers, great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, who are Russians by nationality, to their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

Meanwhile, Communist deputy Ivan Nikitchuk has put forward an initiative to ease up rules of receiving Russian citizenship by Russian speakers living in the former Soviet republics, if they “are exposed to discrimination for their ethno-cultural, political or professional identity.”