You're reading: Ukraine defines a new border with separatist-controlled territories (MAP)

Ukraine's parliament granted a special status to some parts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast, and defined the new border of those territories in a Tuesday vote that followed complicated negotiations among coalition members and the president, who authored the bills.


A
total of 265 Ukrainian lawmakers backed the decision to give a
special status to the territories, but only after clean and
transparent elections are held on those territories under Ukraine’s
law. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said in his twitter
microblog that such a sequence was create to “prevent clever
manipulations”.

The
elections must be monitored and given a green light by the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, following the
Minsk- 2 agreements coined by leaders of four countries a month ago.

President
Petro Poroshenko welcomed the parliament’s move, saying that “it
occurred on the 30th day after the Minsk agreements have been signed
in strict coordination with these Minsk deal.”


Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov disagreed with this assessment,
however. He said he would appeal to German and French colleagues,
because the ultimate goal is the implementation of the Minsk
agreements and the new draft law would change the special status in
Donbas because of the elections.

German
chancellor Angela Merkel praised Poroshenko’s initiative
before the vote, however
.
It
was a very bold move of the Ukrainian President to introduce a bill
on a special status to the government,” Merkel said after the
meeting with Poroshenko in Berlin on March 16. “I understand that
it was a difficult decision.”


Denis
Pushilin, one of the separatist leaders, has indicated that he does
not like the new law either. “(Self-proclaimed) republics won’t
recognize any of the amendments to the law submitted by Poroshenko if
those were not agreed with us,” said Pushilin. “Those
(amendments) are legally meaningless and politically insignificant.”

The
parliament has also voted for a separate law recognizing the
specially defined territories as “temporary occupied”. On top of
that, it approved Poroshenko’s appeal to the U.N. Security Council to
sent peace keeping troops to Ukraine’s embattled east.

KyivPost Plus

Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]