You're reading: Ukraine cancels use of daylight saving time

Ukraine will no longer use daylight saving time, after 266 MPs voted on Tuesday to scrap the measure in the country.

"The Verkhovna Rada decrees to fix the time of the second time zone by adding one hour on the territory of Ukraine from March 27, 2011," reads the draft bill, which was authored by Oleh Nadosha from the Regions Party.

The document also notes that previous draft bills have lost their validity, in particular, on the introduction of the daylight saving time from 1992 and the draft bill on the changing timekeeping on the territory of the Soviet Union from 1990.

Traditionally the switch to summer time occurs on the last Sunday of March, and the change to winter time occurs on the last Sunday of October.

Earlier, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced that he had decided to abolish the use of daylight saving time from the autumn of 2011. The same has been done by Belarus, Georgia and the countries of Central Asia.

In 2011, 82 countries are using summer time (nine countries from this list don’t use this time in all of their regions) and 159 countries don’t use it. In particular, all of the European countries change to summer time (except Iceland and Russia), Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran, Israel, the United States (apart from one state), Canada (apart from one province) and a number of other countries.

Seven former Soviet republics, Japan, China, India, Iraq, the majority of the countries in North Africa and another countries have stopped changing their clocks.

The majority of countries of Africa, the Arabian peninsula, southeast Asia and Venezuela have never adopted daylight saving time.

Читайте об этом на www.kyivpost.ua