The beginning of the new session week made the power and the opposition to sit down at the negotiation table again, this time in the office of the Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Rybak. In the morning the Acting Prime Minister Serhii Arbuzov, members of parliament, Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka, Head of the Presidential Administration Andrii Kliuiev and representatives of diplomatic missions visited the parliament. However, Pshonka and Zakharchenko did not stay in parliament for long. When some MPs started to shout “Murderers!” at them, the top officials hurried out of the session hall.
Earlier the opposition expressed its fears that the power could hold a parliamentary blitzkrieg and vote with a majority for Andrii Kliuiev’s candidature for the office of prime minister of Ukraine, and Andrii Portnov – for the office of the head of Presidential Administration, whereas Vitalii Zakharchenko would be appointed the Head of the National Security and Defense Council. However, according to members of the parliamentary minority, the voting has not taken place for reasons which had nothing to do with the opposition.
Regionnaires refuse to have anything to do with these talks. They say there is no sense in appointing Kliuiev the prime minister, because he has become head of the Presidential Administration only recently. “These are fantasies of the opposition,” Regionnaire Mykhailo Chechetov told The Day.
The unwillingness of the parliamentary majority to include on the agenda and correspondingly vote the so-called VRU bill “On restoring of legitimacy of the constitutional order in Ukraine,” which had been offered by the opposition, became a stumbling block for further functioning of the VRU for people’s deputies in both camps. However, the Communists started again to talk about the alleged reasonability of splitting Ukraine into federations, and PoR MPs more often stated that it is important to negotiate with other leaders of the Maidan, in particular, the Right Sector and Afghan veterans, who have recently expressed their desire to take part in negotiations between the power and parliamentary opposition. The MPs took a long break.
“The situation in parliament reminds me of a bog, when one part does not want, and the other cannot do anything: in this situation the power does not want to change anything, whereas the opposition is unable to do this,” Serhii Mishchenko, an unaffiliated MP, told The Day. “Today they are jointly looking for best possible way of solving the situation. It is important for the opposition to save face before the people in the Maidan and ‘talk down’ the question of the Constitution, agreeing to create a committee to draft changes to the Constitution.”
“Apparently, no new majority will be formed. There is no political will of the oligarchs who are now controlling the majority of PoR MPs. Whereas last time many Regionnaires were outraged, spoke about some changes, wanted to vote together with the opposition, now it is clear that the oligarchs have reversed. And the question is not to the PoR deputies, but those who are standing behind them,” Mishchenko is sure.
The opposition deputies confirm this thesis off records. However, they assure that they are looking for other ways to ride out the crisis. “If we fail the Maidan, the Maidan will fail us,” one of the oppositionists shared his opinion. “We don’t want to be living corpses.” “At the moment the opposition is doing everything possible to make people’s demand heard and satisfied at maximum,” the interlocutor concluded.
There is a counterbalance. Viktor Baloha, an unaffiliated MP, wrote on his FB page: “MPs say one thing from the VR rostrum, whereas at a session of the Batkivshchyna faction Vlasenko read a letter – it is easy to say from whom – which reads that Batkivshchyna should not vote for returning of the 2004 Constitution; it should walk out of the talks immediately; it should get for early presidential elections. The candidate has not been announced yet.”
The politician continues: “I have only one question. Don’t Batkivshchyna MPs understand a thing? The proposals expressed in the letter are a purely Russian scenario. Does anybody need it – Ukraine, the Maidan, the community? No.”
