Updated 1:43 p.m. Moscow Time
MOSCOW, October 8 (RIA Novosti) – Moscow is concerned with the Kiev government’s reluctance to launch a constitutional reform and a national dialogue, possibly because it is too busy with the upcoming parliamentary elections, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday.
Lavrov said that Kiev was one of the signatories to the April 17 Geneva memorandum that includes provisions about the launch of a constitutional reform and a nationwide dialogue involving all political forces and regions of Ukraine.
“This obligation needs to be fulfilled. And we are worried by the fact that Ukrainian politicians are too busy with their distinctive techniques of conducting an election campaign and are doing nothing to eventually launch such a nationwide dialogue, a constitutional reform,” he said.
This summer, newly elected Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that Ukraine would not become a federation, though the country's authorities were ready for decentralization. He then brought the corresponding constitutional amendments before the country's parliament for debate.
Poroshenko's amendments entitle local authorities to give a special status to Russian as well as other languages within the corresponding administrative and territorial units.
On September 4, during the NATO summit in Wales, Poroshenko, said that the new parliamentary elections in Ukraine, scheduled to take place on October 26, would help accelerate the reform process. The Ukrainian president noted that the conflict in the east of the country is not an excuse for delaying the reform.
The conflict started in mid-April when Kiev launched a military operation against independence supporters in Ukraine's southeastern regions, who refused to recognize the new government which came to power as a result of the February coup.
On September 5, a ceasefire agreement was reached between representatives from Kiev and the self-proclaimed people's republics of Donetsk and Luhansk at the meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine in the Belarusian capital, Minsk.
