Today the Verkhovna Rada has passed the presidential bill on amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine on decentralization in the first reading. A draft resolution was supported by 265 MPs. The parliament needed 226 votes to pass the bill in the first reading.
At the next session of parliament on September 1st the Verkhovna Rada needs at least 300 votes out of 450 for the final adoption of the bill on amendments to the constitution. According to the Minsk Agreements, the constitutional reform must be completed before the end of this year.
Ukrainian political analyst Alexei Poltorakov told Vestnik Kavkaza that these amendments have a purely technical nature, and even after its adoption Ukraine still remains a unitary state. "Any offers or potential amendments at the level of parliament and the president don't have a fundamental nature and don't change anything. They don't turn unitary Ukraine into any version of a federal state. They simply state the fact that certain regions of the Donetsk and Lugansk territories de facto have a special status," he explained.
"These amendments are taken as a part of the full implementation of the Minsk Agreements by Ukraine. So the ball is thrown to the side of the counterparties, primarily to the Russian side," the expert noted.
"However, the amendments are more political than legal, and this should always be borne in mind," he added.
But even such a defective decentralization, according to Poltorakov, can be beneficial. "It will reduce the number of political tensions, open the door to dialogue with the counterparties and with the opposition even wider," he said.
"The adoption of the administrative law helps Ukraine to open its eyes to the objective circumstances and set itself an objective diagnosis," the expert stressed.
"We are openly acknowledging and fixing the problem, and for us such an agreement is a certain starting point in deciding how to get out of the Ukrainian crisis," the political analyst concluded.
At least 30 people were wounded in fierce clashes outside the Ukrainian parliament. An adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Minister, Anton Gerashchenko, wrote on his Facebook page that a grenade was thrown at police. "Several National Guard soldiers were seriously wounded. Their lives are in danger."
