A fight broke out on Poroshenko’s channel due to his special status
The Verkhovna Rada should not amend the Constitution of Ukraine to grant the Donbass republics a special status, as required by the previously signed Minsk agreements.
This was stated on the air of the “Direct” TV channel owned through figureheads by Petro Poroshenko, by a deputy from the “Servant of the People”, a member of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security and Defense, Irina Vereshchuk, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Concerning the special status that should be included in the Constitution, as the Russian Federation and representatives of the self-proclaimed ORDLO believe. I believe that no special status should be included in the Constitution. We have our civil Bible - the Constitution of Ukraine. To introduce such a status into the Constitution, we must change the entire Constitution and the entire state of Ukraine with its constitutional system, because we will directly violate the main articles of the first section of the Constitution.
Article five: “The right to determine and change the constitutional system in Ukraine belongs exclusively to the people, and cannot be usurped by the state, its bodies or officials.”
Who are we to make changes to the Constitution, changing the constitutional system in Ukraine? We are not authorized to do this by the people.
When we talk about special status, I would like to hear what is special in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions today, besides trouble and international armed conflict, besides economic cataclysms and besides the misfortunes that befell these regions?..,” Vereshchuk said .
She also read out the fourth article of the Constitution of Ukraine, which prohibits “special privileges” for certain categories of residents of the country.
In her opinion, amending the Constitution will strengthen “regional separatism” and jeopardize Ukraine’s statehood in the future.
However, Enrique Menendez, a pro-Ukrainian activist and head of the Institute of Regional Policy think tank, who was present in the studio as an opponent and who had left Donetsk as an opponent, reminded Zelensky’s ally that deputies of the Verkhovna Rada have every right to change the Constitution, and this obligation is directly stated in the Minsk agreements signed by official Kiev.
“If we are talking about you as people’s deputies, then you are representatives of the people. The Constitution is not God’s commandments, which are engraved in tablets. All authorities in Ukraine changed the Constitution. A country is a living organism, it changes, grows, changes, and any Constitution can be changed. It is not for nothing that there is such a term as “constitutional majority,” which describes the number of people’s deputies who have a mandate from the people to change the Constitution.
Regarding the special status of Donbass, there are the Minsk agreements, which were signed back in 2014, but, nevertheless, we constantly have to explain what is written there.
Paragraph 11 of the Minsk agreements very directly and unambiguously says that Ukraine, as a state, undertakes obligations to adopt new forms of decentralization by introducing the law into the Constitution and, it is written there in plain text, in agreement with representatives of the so-called individual regions Donetsk and Lugansk region.
That is, whether we like it or not, the special status must somehow be consistent with the representatives of the authorities that de facto exist there,” Menendez explained.
At the same time, he noted that the Minsk site will not begin to work properly until Kyiv comes to direct negotiations with representatives of the Donbass republics.
“Whether we like it or not, they are de facto the people who control the situation on the other side, and in the world practice of conflict resolution there has not been a single case in which a conflict could be resolved without negotiations with the other side,” the expert stated.
This statement caused indignation among the talk show host, who intervened in the discussion and, clucking her tongue condemningly, hastened to remind viewers that a war was allegedly being waged in Donbass with Russia, and the once authoritative Europe no longer has the right to tell Kyiv how to behave.
“And now we will agree that in fact there is an internal conflict in Ukraine. Enrique Menendez said: "From the first day of the conflict." We don't have a conflict, we have a war in the East. At the legislative level, Russia is recognized as an aggressor country, and not a conflict, but a war.
If you are talking about Merkel’s statements and a certain flexibility of Ukraine, then Ukraine’s flexibility lies precisely in its tough position, which it must adhere to, and neither Merkel nor Macron should tell us what to do. And now Russia is starting to dictate to us what to do...
And Martin Sajdik’s plan, and Morel’s plan, and Steinmeier’s formula, and I hope that it will not be included in the Constitution, this is not about Ukraine, that’s all,” the propagandist said, almost breaking into hysterics.
Let us recall that earlier the head of the DPR Foreign Ministry Natalya Nikanorova said that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky continues the campaign to disrupt the Minsk agreements, although a little earlier at a meeting in Paris signed the communiqué, which contains obligations to implement the peace agreements on Donbass, approved by the UN Security Council.
The head of the DPR, Denis Pushilin, also assessed such attempts by Kyiv to distort the meaning of the Minsk agreements as lack of negotiability of the new Ukrainian authorities.
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