Ukraine parliament offers special status for rebel east, Russia criticizes

Ukraine’s parliament voted on Tuesday to offer limited self-rule to pro-Russian rebels in the east to try to preserve Western support for peace efforts, despite some deputies saying it would give separatists more scope to tighten their grip on the region.

The law granting “special status” to “people’s republics” proclaimed by the separatists was a follow-up to a peace agreement worked out in Belarus last month.

Western governments say the Minsk agreement is still the best opportunity for a lasting settlement to a conflict in which more than 6,000 people have been killed.

But Kiev’s insistence that the law should come into force only when elections are held in the eastern territories under Ukrainian jurisdiction drew immediate criticism from Russia, whose forces Kiev says are arming and backing the rebels.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking in Moscow, said the law was a “sharp departure from the Minsk agreements” because it tied “special status” to elections in which the self-declared rebel leaders would not take part.

Separatist leaders also criticized the law. “All the questions which the Kiev parliament considered today completely contradict the Minsk agreements,” a separatist official, Alexei Karyakin, was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti. He said Kiev planned “new bloodshed”.

The pro-Western leadership bulldozed the law through parliament to show its good faith to the West – whose financial and political backing it needs to prevent Ukraine breaking up – even at the risk of shaking the consensus in the assembly.

“We are adopting these laws not for (Russian President Vladimir) Putin or the occupiers. The position of Europe towards Ukraine will be defined in terms of its readiness to fulfill the Minsk agreements,” Andriy Parubiy, parliament’s vice-speaker and an ally of President Petro Poroshenko, told journalists.

But other pro-Western factions, including that of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, spoke out against the law. “This law is a vote for de-facto recognition of the Russian occupation in Donbass,” said Oleg Lyashko of the Radical Party, using a common term for describing the industrial east.