On March 6 parliamentary speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk opened a plenary session of the legislature following the signing of a so-called Protocol of Understanding. The NATO ambitions of Ukraine been at the centre of opposition accusations that the current state leaders had usurped power and ignored the will of the people. A January letter from President Yushchenko, PM Tymoshenko and Speaker Yatsenyuk, which contained an appeal to NATO officials for a Ukrainian Membership Action Plan sparked the crisis, with Party of Regions and Communist Party MPs physically blockading the parliament hall and filling it with giant balloons. A compromise has now been struck which guarantees that Ukraine’s NATO membership bid will only be pursued after national referendum on the subject.
Victory for the Opposition?
This compromise agreement was eventually supported by 248 deputies from all fractions except the Communist Party. The document also includes an item listing the Speaker’s duty to inform the NATO general secretary about parliament’s decision. “This project is evidence that we have asserted the right of the people to decide the NATO question,” commented Viktor Yanukovych, the head of the Party of Regions and leader of the Opposition.
The head of BYUT faction in the parliament, Ivan Kyrylenko, predicted that a NATO referendum would only be held in ten years, once all the necessary reforms to introduce European standards of living in Ukraine were complete.
Back to work
According BYUT MP Mykola Tomenko, the Protocol of Understanding includes as a priority questions for the Verkhovna Rada’s consideration about the government’s work programme, social bills concerning wages and pension maintenance, and also legislation about limiting deputies’ immunity and abolishing privileges. PM Tymoshenko expressed her hope that the Verkhovna Rada would now be able to pass the laws on WTO accession and alterations to the state budget as soon as possible.
However, the parliament renewed its session with attempts to abolish deputy immunity. Although all political forces supported this idea during the pre-election campaign, they can’t now find the way to bring it about. However, the parliament did cope with such high-profile questions as an investigation into abuse of office by city authorities in Kyiv and Kharkiv.
On March 7 the deputies formed temporary investigation commissions on constitutional violations by Kyiv City Mayor Leonid Chernovetskiy and other Kyiv officials as well as other violations by the Mayor of Kharkiv Mykhaylo Dobkin, and the Secretary of the Kharkiv City Council, Hennadiy Kernes.
Oleksiy Holubutskiy, the deputy director of the Situational Models Agency argues that the decision to return to work came from a fear of new elections, which would only benefit Tymoshenko’s political force. “Judging by all information, everyone is now fighting against one and the same person, the strongest and the most popular – Yulia Tymoshenko. Today a parliamentary election would be a defeat for everyone except her, because she could realistically expect to claim 40% or even more of the vote. For the time being it is necessary to involve her in as many scandals as possible in the hope that it will decrease her rating,” he says.
