Ukraine passes bill to get occupied regions back from Russia

Ukraine passes bill to get occupied regions back from Russia:

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday passed a bill that aims to reintegrate the eastern territories currently controlled by Russia-backed separatists, and goes as far as to declare support for taking them back by military force if necessary.

The bill describes the areas in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions as “temporarily occupied” by “aggressor country” Russia. President Petro Poroshenko welcomed the new bill, saying it would help restore control of the east by “political and diplomatic means.”

Russia warned, however, that the deal effectively kills the peace accords that Ukraine is party to and that were supposed to resolve the deadly conflict. Fighting in eastern Ukraine, which erupted weeks after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, has killed more than 10,000 people since April 2014. The 2015 Minsk peace deal helped reduce the scope of hostilities, but clashes have continued and attempts at a political settlement have stalled.

The new bill, passed by the Supreme Rada after days of raucous debate, contains no reference to the peace deal brokered by Russia, France and Germany that obliged Ukraine to offer a broad autonomy to the separatist regions and a sweeping amnesty to the rebels. Most Ukrainian political parties rejected that idea as a betrayal of national interests.

“We can’t embed diplomatic and political agreements that are prone to change into the Ukrainian legislation,” Ivan Vinnyk, a member of Poroshenko’s faction in parliament, said on Thursday while explaining why the Minsk deal wasn’t mentioned.

In a terse statement issued after the vote, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said that the bill is nothing “but a preparation for a new war.” The foreign ministry said the bill runs against Kiev’s commitments under the Minsk accords and further alienates Ukrainians living in separatist-held areas.

“Sadly, we are witnessing the making of a situation which is fraught with a dangerous escalation in Ukraine and (carrying) unpredictable consequences for global peace and security.” Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament’s upper house, said the new bill effectively spikes the Minsk peace pact, the implementation of which the U.S. and the European Union have said was a condition for lifting sanctions against Russia.

“Kiev has gone from sabotaging the Minsk agreements to burying them,” he said. The bill backs a ban on trade as well as a transport blockade of the east that Ukraine introduced last year. Of all the documents issued by separatist authorities, Ukraine would only recognize birth and death certificates.

Alexander Zakharchenko, the chief rebel leader in the Donetsk region, also criticized the new bill as a flagrant violation of the Minsk agreement signed by Ukraine and the rebels, saying it would encourage hawkish elements in Ukraine and fuel hostilities.

Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta research center, an independent Kiev-based think-tank, said the main purpose of the bill is to defend Ukraine’s interests in international courts.

H/t reader eric:

“The banksters have to keep the hot spots HOT!!!”

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5 thoughts on “Ukraine passes bill to get occupied regions back from Russia”

  1. https://www.reuters.com/article/britain-tutankhamun-dna-idAFL3E7J135P20110801
    LONDON, Aug 1 (Reuters Life!) – Up to 70 percent of British men and half of all Western European men are related to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, geneticists in Switzerland said.

    Scientists at Zurich-based DNA genealogy centre, iGENEA, reconstructed the DNA profile of the boy Pharaoh, who ascended the throne at the age of nine, his father Akhenaten and grandfather Amenhotep III, based on a film that was made for the Discovery Channel.

    The results showed that King Tut belonged to a genetic profile group, known as haplogroup R1b1a2, to which more than 50 percent of all men in Western Europe belong, indicating that they share a common ancestor.

    Among modern-day Egyptians this haplogroup contingent is below 1 percent, according to iGENEA.

    “It was very interesting to discover that he belonged to a genetic group in Europe — there were many possible groups in Egypt that the DNA could have belonged to,” said Roman Scholz, director of the iGENEA Centre.

    Around 70 percent of Spanish and 60 percent of French men also belong to the genetic group of the Pharaoh who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.

    “We think the common ancestor lived in the Caucasus about 9,500 years ago,” Scholz told Reuters.

    It is estimated that the earliest migration of haplogroup R1b1a2 into Europe began with the spread of agriculture in 7,000 BC, according to iGENEA

    Reply

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