Sixty-two percent of Ukrainian citizens do not think that the law on the special self-government status for individual districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and on amnesty for members of illegal armed groups, if passed, will guarantee peace in eastern Ukraine, according to a poll conducted by the GfK Ukraine pollster.
The poll indicates that only 31.6 percent of those surveyed believe in the positive outcome of these political decisions.
However, support for this law was expressed by 38.6 percent of respondents and 43.6 percent oppose it, while 17.8 percent of those questioned were undecided.
One third of respondents (35.5 percent) backed the law on amnesty, while 57.3 percent oppose it and 7 percent were undecided.
Sixty-seven percent of those surveyed were angered by the parliament’s closed-door vote on the two laws and only 10 percent of respondents support this mode of voting. Concurrently, 19.5 percent of those surveyed said they did not care.
Thirty-four percent of those questioned support the Batkivschyna party’s initiative to repeal these laws immediately and 55 percent oppose it. Eleven percent of respondents were undecided.
The poll had been ordered by the Open Politics Foundation and lasted from Sept. 19 to 21. Eight hundred interviews were conducted by telephone. Respondents were aged over 18. The margin of error was 3.5 percent.
Reports said earlier that the Verkhovna Rada passed a president-proposed law in closed-door hearings on Sept. 16 that would give individual districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions special self-government status for three years and set early local elections in these regions for Dec. 7 of this year.
The Verkhovna Rada also passed a law amnestying individual categories of citizens who committed crimes between Feb. 22 2014 and the date of this law’s enforcement in the territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions where a counterterrorism operation was conducted.
These laws have not been signed yet by Verkhovna Rada Speaker Oleksandr Turchynov or by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
