KIEV, October 24. /TASS/. Petitions of the residents of two Ukrainian cities, Dnieper (formerly Dnepropetrovsk) in the southeast of the country, and Uzhgorod in the sub-Carpathian regions have rallied the necessary number of votes for consideration by local authorities.

Appropriate reports have been placed in the unified system of local petitions.

"We definitively state the importance of passing a bill on state support to development, promotion and protection of the Russian language and the languages of ethnic communities in Ukraine," says the public petition supported by people in Dnieper.

The authors of the document refer to a bill that was registered in the Verkhovna Rada national parliament earlier. It aims "to give a special regional status to the Russian language and to ensure protection to the rights of Russian-speakers in this country."

The petition that won popular support in Uzhgorod contains a similar appeal.

Both documents underline the strivings of the incumbent authorities in Kiev to undermine the significance of the Russian language for Ukraine and to marginalize it.

"Attempts to scale down the significance of the Russian language on the cultural space of Ukraine are getting more and more active while their obvious deplorable aftermaths are ignored, beginning from the artificially fanned tensions in society to the risks of falling out of the realm of the grand cultural heritage related to the Russian language," the sub-Carpathian petition says.

A spokesperson for the Uzhgorod town hall said this body of self-government does not have the powers to appeal to the Verkhovna Rada for adoption of the new law but the regional authorities "regularly make steps to support and develop the Ukrainian language as well as the languages of ethnic minorities - Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Armenian, and Roma.".