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Ukraine's parliament registers draft resolution on disbanding Communist Party faction

Lawmakers of the Batkivshchina party, Leonid Yemets and Aleksandr Briginets, initiated the resolution that is not the first one registered in the Ukrainian parliament

© ИТАР-ТАСС/ Максим Никитин

KIEV, May 16 /ITAR-TASS/. Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada, the national parliament, has registered a draft resolution on disbanding “the faction of deputies of the Communist Party of Ukraine.” A notification on that was posted on the parliament's website on Friday.

Lawmakers of the Batkivshchina party, Leonid Yemets and Aleksandr Briginets, initiated the resolution that is not the first one registered in the Ukrainian parliament.

On March 18, a draft law on banning the Communist Party was registered upon a request from the Batkivshchina party lawmaker, Vyacheslav Kirilenko. In late February, far-right MP Oleh Lyashko initiated a resolution on disbanding the Party of Regions and the Communist Party. He said that “the members of the Party of Regions together with communists are to be blamed for the current situation in the country.”

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s parliament-appointed interim President Aleksander Turchinov, who is also the parliament speaker, during a plenary session called on the Justice Ministry to look into the Communist Party’s involvement in separatist activities and, if necessary, to ban it in a court of law.

Turchinov’s appeal followed Pyotr Simonenko’s speech in the Verkhovna Rada when the Communist Party leader urged the Kiev interim authorities “to stop the anti-terror operation in the country’s east” and to come to a decision on Ukraine’s federalisation.

In his comments on the possible ban the Communist Party of Ukraine, Simonenko said that “all the attempts of our political opponents to wipe the Communist Party out of the political scene are abortive.”

“These statements [to ban the party] have again testified to the fact that they [Kiev authorities] turned a deaf ear to opposite opinions,” Simonenko said. “The Communist Party’s programme is clear-cut and the party takes a principled stand and that’s why they are endeavouring to wipe it off the political arena.

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