"My constitutional amendment project is ready. It requires the political will of the MPs, who should once and for all make themselves equal with citizens of Ukraine in terms of legal rights," Poroshenko said.
However, Oleg Soskin, Ukrainian analyst and chief of the Kiev-based Institute of Public Transformation, told Sputnik Radio that the country doesn’t really need the constitutional amendments championed by Poroshenko.
As he explained, virtually all of Poroshenko’s predecessors tried to amend the constitution at some point, and it never ended well for them.
"Well, now we have another president who doesn’t like the Constitution of Ukraine, and so he wants to amend it. Usually when a president starts making such changes he immediately disappears afterwards. I think that he (Poroshenko) won’t succeed, first and foremost because he’s a usurper, an illegal president," Soskin said.
The analyst further remarked that Ukrainian lawmakers likely won’t be amused by Poroshenko’s initiative.
"I think that there will be a negative reaction because he (Poroshenko) didn’t offer to revoke his own immunity, he only mentioned theirs. Everyone knows that he (Poroshenko) has close ties with Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko: even the laws were ‘adjusted’ so that he (Lutsenko) could be ‘forced’ into the office. And now Lutsenko sends whole batches of trumped up accusations against MPs to the Supreme Court to strip them of their immunity. And there’s already an alternative line – to pass the impeachment law, which, I think, may be adopted because MPs understand that Poroshenko is heading towards dictatorship and wants to legally make himself a dictator," Soskin added.
He also noted that recently the Ukrainian president has come up with a lot of spontaneous initiatives.
"While listening to Poroshenko today I’m starting to get nervous, and so are the people. They say it’s some kind of complex mental condition. And his aides are apparently beginning to feel uncomfortable too, because he (Poroshenko) says things that are impossible to explain afterwards," Soskin surmised.
