Moscow hopes that the roundtables aimed at establishing national dialogue in Ukraine will not become a folding screen for a hushed constitutional reform.
“If the idea is to use the roundtables simply as a folding screen, as
a means of letting off steam, while holding the actual reform in a
closed manner, it will not add trust on the part of the southeast to the
actions being undertaken in Verkhovna Rada by the parties which formed a
coalition,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a press
conference in Moscow on Monday.
Verkhovna Rada set up a committee in charge of drafting
constitutional reform but “additional information, where changes are
being made, is unavailable, no one knows about it,” he recalled.
“But there has been yet another report about these changes having
already been sent for assessment to the Venice Commission of the Council
of Europe, which is somewhat odd because the procedure normally
involves first the completion of a nationwide debate of any particular
law before it is assessed by the Venice Commission,” Lavrov said.
Thus the constitutional reform process announced by the authorities
“is not transparent, and the roundtables announced in parallel are not
discussing these changes which have already been made by this hush-hush
commission of Verkhovna Rada,” the foreign minister said.
“Any contacts and talks are better than nothing but these are just
the first steps,” he said. “And we are calling for the national dialogue
to be closely linked to the constitutional reform process in accordance
with the Geneva Statement of April 17 and the OSCE roadmap based on it,
and for representatives of all political, public forces from across the
country and all Ukrainian regions to be involved in it,” Lavrov said.
