KIEV, June 21 (RIA Novosti) - City council deputies of Kryvyi Rih in Ukraine's eastern Dnipropetrovsk region voted Wednesday to make Russian a regional language, and declared the city a NATO-free territory.
Fifty nine of the council's 90 deputies voted in favor of the decision.
Earlier this year, the authorities in eastern Ukrainian regions including Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Luhansk, as well as in the Crimea, where ethnic Russians constitute a majority of the population, adopted resolutions to put the language on a par with Ukrainian in state and public institutions of their respective municipalities.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko asked prosecutors in early June to legally challenge the decisions by local councils to make Russian a regional language.
