WASHINGTON, November 15 (Sputnik) – Ukraine's new coalition government agreement will include a provision on the country's accession to NATO, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleh Mahnitskiy has told Sputnik.
"…under the present political situation, NATO accession will be one of the provisions of the new coalition's [Ukraine's coalition government] agreement," Mahnitskiy said Friday at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
Earlier on Friday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's party, Poroshenko's Bloc, published a working draft of the coalition agreement on its website, which said that the document has been created in the course of two weeks together with the Samopomich (Self-Help) party, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk's People's Front party, Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party headed by Ukraine"s former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and the nationalist Radical Party.
The document drafts a number of reforms and stipulates a restructuring of the deployment of Kiev forces so as to ensure "a permanent military presence in the east of the country".
On October 26, Ukrainians went to polls in a snap election to the Ukrainian parliament, known as the Verkhovna Rada. Parts of the southeastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions did not vote.
In the wake of the vote, Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk entered talks to form a "powerful democratic coalition" of pro-European parties in the Rada, a move applauded by the West.
On November 2, the self-proclaimed people's republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (DPR and LPR) held their independent elections for the heads of local governments and representatives of legislative bodies. Ukraine's central authorities have refused to recognize the elections.
The conflict in southeastern Ukraine escalated in mid-April when Kiev launched a military operation against independence supporters in the region who refused to recognize the county's new government which came to power as a result of the February coup.
The West and NATO have accused Russia of meddling in Ukraine's internal affairs and even went as far as to claim that Russia has sent troops to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Russia, which has played a vital role in the de-escalation of the crisis in Ukraine, has repeatedly denied the allegations, expression concern over the build-up of NATO forces along its eastern border.
