DONETSK, October 19 (RIA Novosti) - The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) will never become part of a united Ukraine, the breakaway region's Vice Prime Minister Andrei Purgin said Saturday.
"The latest estimate is that the conflict has so far killed 4,000 people in Donbas. We can't talk about any political alliance or a unity state with Kiev after what has happened," Andrei Purgin told journalists.
He described the existing ceasefire in eastern Ukraine as a respite ahead of the winter and said it was not the first step toward the "return" of Donbas under the Ukrainian jurisdiction.
Purgin said that the Donetsk republic was not going to elect its members to the country's parliament, known as the Verkhovna Rada. The snap parliamentary elections are scheduled for September 26.
He added that the same went for the December 7 elections, set by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's law on the special status of Donbas, a large swathe of land in eastern Ukraine.
"We will hold our own election on November 2. I can hardly imagine why we would take part in the Verkhovna Rada elections. Even if we elect our representatives, there are no guarantees they will not get killed in Kiev. It's enough to know what they do to opposition politicians there," Purgin said.
On September 16, the Ukrainian parliament approved a law on self-administration in parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. It came into effect on Saturday. The legislation granted Donbas a special status, guaranteed the right to use Russian or any other language and scheduled local elections for December. The legislation also said that the full list of special status areas would be drawn up by the Verkhovna Rada.
