MOSCOW, May 15 (RIA Novosti) – The Kiev authorities have done nothing to start the process of constitutional dialogue in Ukraine with the participation of all of the country's regions, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said Thursday.
“It's noticeable that Kiev has done practically nothing to start the constitutional process with the participation of all of Ukraine’s regions, which would take the country out of its severe political crisis, and the logic of the April 17 Geneva agreements that they incite,” Lukashevich said during a briefing.
The final phase of the special operation against federalists in southeastern Ukraine signals Kiev’s reluctance to begin the actual national peace process, he added.
Amid the continuing security operation by the Kiev regime, the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics in eastern Ukraine held self-determination referendums on Sunday, declaring themselves sovereign states on Monday.
Almost 90 percent of voters endorsed political independence from Kiev.
Speaking about the events, Lukashevich said the important step does not consist in recognizing the self-proclaimed republics, but in continuing dialogue.
“We are talking here about who is going to recognize whom; the most important now consists in pushing away the threat of a civil war in Ukraine," Lukashevich said.
“And if the proposal to the regions [in Ukraine] is an ‘anti -terroristic' operation, killing more and more people … instead of the dialogue continuation, those people will have the right to take similar measures that will be directed to the self-organization in the framework of some or other territorial formation in Ukrainian territory,” he said.
“The matter is not certainly the recognition or non-recognition. The matter is that Russia has supported and actively continues to support launching, with an international assistance, a wide national dialogue on the ways to form the future governmental structure of Ukraine, and this is the most important,” he added.
Russia has called the Western-backed military operation against protesters a “punitive act” and accused Ukraine’s authorities of waging a war against their own people.
