Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics urge Ukraine’s parliament to pass law on special status of Donbass territories

Today, on March 16, the leadership of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) called on the Supreme Rada members to support a bill that looks to give a special status to certain districts in Donbass. The statement came from Denis Pushilin and Vladislav Daynego, the DPR and LPR authorized representatives to the Contact Group for peaceful settlement of the conflict.

“We hope for sooner adoption of a relevant enactment by Ukraine’s Supreme Rada,” the Donetsk News Agency quotes the representatives as saying. “’The war party must not take advantage of the enactment to revise the ‘Law on the Special Status’ or amend it without the consent of the Donbass representatives. We reiterate that adoption of the enactment in line with the set of measures adopted in Minsk will help advancing the peace process and create preconditions for confidence building.”

To recall, under the point 4 of the “Set of measures for the implementation of the Minsk Agreement signed by the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk,12 February 2015” the Supreme Rada was to pass a Law ‘On temporary regime of local self -governance in the separate regions of Donetsk and Lugansk” till March 14. However, the bill has not been passed yet.  In this light, last week, the heads of the DPR and LPR Alexander Zakharchenko and  Igor Plotnitskiy appealed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President of France Francois Hollande as guarantors of the Minsk agreements asking them to press Ukraine’s leadership over fulfillment of the agreements.

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko submitted a draft enactment on the special status of the Donbass districts to the Supreme Rada on March 15. According to the Ukraine parliament’s website, the next plenary meeting is scheduled for March 17.