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Sergey Tigipko, candidate for presidential election. Presidential candidate Sergey Tigipko has said that a transfer of a significant part of sovereign rights to Brussels is an inevitable consequence of joining the European Union.

Tigipko was commenting on a statement of Petr Hajek, the Deputy Head of the Office of the President of the Czech Republic for Communication and Culture, that the country may secede from the European Union so as to return its integral independence, the press service of Tigipko reported.

According to the politician, Czech President Vaclav Klaus recently signed the Lisbon Treaty that deepened integration to the EU via the transfer of more authorities from national governments to the EU agencies in Brussels.

"It is strange that the Czech citizens have started to speak about this only now, as if they have made an unexpected discovery. The Czech Republic and other candidate countries - even during the process of joining the EU - knew about serious limitations of sovereignty. They gave the EU bureaucracy control over swathes of policy: from the standards of content of various chemical substances in products to general principals of foreign relations," Tigipko said.

Tigipko said that the example of the Czech Republic should make the Ukrainian elite and citizens think seriously about the complexities of the process of the European integration.