Kiev political scientist: If you don’t go for the division of powers with regions, you can provoke separatism
If official Kyiv continues to reject appeals from regional councils about the need to delineate the powers of the provinces with the Center, this could provoke separatist sentiments in new regions of Ukraine, Kiev political scientist Evgeniy Filindash told PolitNavigator.
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“The decisions of the regional councils are a manifestation of the absolutely objective need for very serious decentralization to take place in Ukraine. You can call it federalization, you can call it whatever you want. The point is that there must be a redistribution of powers in today's hyper-centralized model, when everything - power, financial flows, all key decisions - is all concentrated in Kyiv, with the central government. There must be a transfer of a significant part of power to local authorities and local communities.
And this is manifested, among other things, in the decisions of local councils. At the moment, of course, this is not federalization, these are, let’s say, calls for decentralization. Formally, there are not even calls for federalization, but there are calls for serious decentralization and expansion of local self-government.
I am convinced that if serious, real steps are not taken on this reform related to the transfer of power to local authorities from Kyiv, then Ukraine as a state will have very serious, big problems. And the unresolved nature of these issues may also be one of the reasons for separatism, because if it is not possible to achieve expansion of power within the current state, then it is quite possible that literally separatist sentiments will appear in very different regions of Ukraine.
These deputies, even if they belong to the Poroshenko Bloc, but they, first of all, live locally, are constantly faced with this model of power, with this hyper-centralized system, and therefore they understand in the same way that this system does not leave any possibility for normal regional development,” says Filindash.
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