Foreign Ministry: US Senate passes resolution under doubtful procedure, Kyiv not considers necessary to comment on it

The Foreign Ministry of Ukraine has stated that it does not consider it necessary to comment on a resolution on Ukraine passed by the U.S. senate recently.

"The Foreign Ministry of Ukraine does not consider it necessary to comment on the resolution, taking into account the way in which it was considered and the document's declarative and not obligatory character," the ministry's press service told Interfax-Ukraine while commenting on the reports about the passing of the resolution on Ukraine by the Senate.

The ministry added that Ukraine was used to regarding the Senate of the United States as an example of parliamentarianism, high standards of democracy, the supremacy of law and respect for democratic procedures.

"For this reason, it is difficult to take seriously a document that was passed last night according to a procedure that, with due diplomatic restraint, could be described as at least doubtful. What kind of motivation did the authors of the Yulia Tymoshenko resolution have while trying to ignore by all possible means the protests of other senators against the resolution, and with what aim did they quickly make editorial amendments to it? They also proposed the Senate to pass the document as a new document after 0300, several minutes before the closure of the session of Congress, when less than five members of the upper house of the U.S. parliament were present in the sitting hall," the Foreign Ministry said.

The Ukrainian ministry stressed that in such a way some of the members of the Senate had consciously made an attempt to prevent discussion of the resolution, the text of which could raise logical questions and protests from at least several senators, who would demand that the document be considered in the proper manner, "which, actually, always was a peculiarity of both houses of Congress."

"The friends of Tymoshenko's team did everything to give to the Ukrainian media space another falsified reason for groundless loud discussions, and to discredit the upcoming parliamentary elections. These attempts contradict the national interests of Ukraine and are doomed to failure," the Foreign Ministry said.

As reported, on September 22, Serhiy Vlasenko, the defense lawyer of former Ukrainian Premier Yulia Tymoshenko, wrote on his page in Facebook that the U.S. Senate had unanimously passed a resolution on Ukraine with a call for the immediate release of Tymoshenko and other political prisoners. The resolution also calls for the imposition of a visa ban against all officials responsible for Tymoshenko's imprisonment.