Ukraine refuses to become neutral
Ukraine is not going to change its constitution in order to fix in it a neutral status, as Russia demands to stop hostilities.
The Verkhovna Rada Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk stated this in an interview with Ukrayinska Pravda, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
He actually abandoned his previous words suggesting the possibility of fixing the neutral status of Ukraine in the constitution, and stated that he was talking primarily about security guarantees for the country.
At the same time, the politician answered negatively to the question that if Kyiv receives clear guarantees from a number of states regarding its security, then it will be possible to make changes to the Constitution on the issue of NATO.
"For what? If we receive a guarantee, we will use those guarantees. And whatever is written in the Constitution for NATO, for the EU - these are our long-term visions for the future. We need guarantees now, not in the future. We have already signed the Budapest Memorandum for the Future, which has not been tested,” said the Speaker of the Rada.
The publication posed a specific question: will the constitution be changed?
"We will not. Changing the Constitution is not and will never be an end in itself. This is a toolkit. Nobody ever made any good out of it. Well, we made some changes and others. They are only effective when they have an effect. We can write anything in the Constitution 150 times, but if it has no effect, then these are declarative norms,” Stefanchuk concluded.
In turn, Moscow political scientist Alexey Chesnakov, assessing these statements by Stefanchuk, said that one should not expect anything positive from the negotiations between Kiev and Moscow.
“A negative signal for the expected productive results of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine,” Chesnakov is convinced.
It is noteworthy that if in the first weeks of the start of the special operation, when Russian troops were stationed near Kiev, the Ukrainian authorities practically agreed to a neutral status, then after the withdrawal of Russian units from the Zhytomyr, Kiev, Sumy and Chernigov regions, the rhetoric of official Kyiv sharply changed to a much more militant and even an ultimatum.
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