Former members of the Party of Regions and the Communist Party of Ukraine united in the Verkhovna Rada

Photo: PHL

Yesterday, Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Oleksandr Turchynov announced the creation of a new deputy group “For Peace and Stability”. It includes 32 parliamentarians, which is the minimum required number for forming a group that has the rights of a faction. Former members of the Party of Regions faction Vitaliy Hrushevskiy, Yevhen Balytskiy and also Oleksandr Prysyazhnyuk, who together with five deputies abandoned the Communist Party faction, became authorized representatives of the association. Fellow MPs can only guess as to the policy that the new group will conduct and at whom it will be oriented.

As a faction

Former members of the CPU and majoritarian members of the PoR became the foundation of the new deputy group, the composite of which has not yet officially been made public.
The group members admit that they plan to form a political party to run in the early parliamentary elections on the base of the For Peace and Stability deputy group.

“Yes, this will be a political project,” Hrushevskiy confirmed for journalists at a briefing held yesterday. However, he did not disclose any details about the formation of the party, noting only that the main condition for holding of early parliamentary elections should be the settlement of the situation in Donbas.

According to information that Capital possesses, the formation of the new deputy association that has the rights of a faction began a month ago. The namesake inter-faction association headed by Vitaliy Hrushevskiy with 15 deputies became the basis for its formation. Then one parliamentarian who had already signed his application to join the new group and requested anonymity informed Capital that the faction would not be in opposition to the newly elected President Petro Poroshenko or the Cabinet of Ministers.

Be that as it may, member of the newly formed deputy group Oleksandr Holub told Capital that it is too early to speak about a unified position of the deputies of the association regarding the conditions and nature of collaboration with the government. “There are three centrifugal forces in the group – Hrushevskiy, Balytskiy and Prysyazhnyuk. But our common position is to find the points of contiguity to achieve a truce and mitigate damage to the economy,” assures Holub, who together with the other five deputies on Tuesday abandoned the CPU faction.

They explain their action by their disagreement with the policy of CPU leader Petro Symonenko. However, in response the latter threw the defectors out of the party and accused them of “haggling votes with the government” on the money of businessman Serhiy Kurchenko. “Kurchenko formed this faction and paid huge amounts of money to realize this project in the Verkhovna Rada,” Symonenko told journalists in the corridors of the parliament on Wednesday.

Pool of suppositions

The UDAR and PoR factions also stick to the version of Kurchenko’s involvement in the new association, though they comment on this only on the right of anonymity. The businessman himself denied that he financed the creation of the political project in an interview for the Russian Novaya Gazeta. “I do not personally know Kurchenko, never met with him and did not hold talks with his representatives. Symonenko’s accusations that we are financed by Kurchenko are nonsense,” says Holub.

People’s deputy Oleh Medunitsa (Batkivshchyna party) believes that the new association will be a “faction of Putin”. His colleague in the faction Oleksandr Bryhynets offered another version: the group could have been formed as a new coalition in the event that one of the factions would abandon the existing one with the aim of announcing early parliamentary elections.

Noteworthy is that Hrushevskiy, one of the authorized members of the group, announced his own plan for settling the situation in the eastern part of Ukraine and will present the new association in the Verkhovna Rada in the nearest days.

Today, five factions and three deputy groups with the rights of a faction are registered in the parliament.