Oksana Syroid, deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliament and head of the Ukrainian delegation to the eighth Ukraine-Poland Inter-parliamentary Assembly, stressed in her opening speech to the assembly that only returning the militant-occupied territories in Ukraine’s Donbas to government control could start the peace process in eastern Ukraine.
According to Syroid, elections in the occupied territories, if held without the withdrawal of the Russian troops, restoring control over Russian-Ukrainian border and the unity in the Ukrainian political arena, would only spread the “Russian virus and Russian propaganda on Ukrainian territory,” Ukraine Today reports.
See unian.info’s video section for more of the latest news from Ukraine in video from Ukraine Today, Ukraine’s 24-hour English-language news channel.