The recent campaign trip to the Mykolayiv Oblast by Party of Regions leader Viktor Yanukovych triggered off a nasty incident in Voznesensk. The fistfight orchestrated by Yanukovych team is telling evidence of what dubious means are used by Viktor Yanukovych while on a campaign trail.

Jan. 31 Yanukovych was scheduled to meet with voters at Voznesensk town House of Culture. Local PORA branch took a decision to post outside pickets to demonstrate its attitude to Yanukovych who tried to win the highest office in 2004 using massive fraud, coercion and vote-fixing. PORA duly notified the town authorities about its proposed protest action and got the go-ahead for its pickets. It turned out, however, that the permission to picket the Yanukovych event was not enough to ensure the picket’s safety.

“We are against the opaque techniques used to recreate the Orange coalition. We note the absolute lack of progress on this issue,” head of the PORA-PRP civic bloc political council Vladyslav Kaskiv said in a briefing Feb. 3.  This does not mean, however, that PORA-PRP has backtracked on its idea to re-unite the former Orange parties to create a majority in the parliament to be elected on Mach 26, Kaskiv noted.

In due course, PORA-PRP has sent letters to its political partners, Our Ukraine including, where it stressed the need to unconditionally form an Orange coalition as soon as possible. 

The leader of the civic coalition PORA-ROP Vitaliy Klychko and the head of Secretariat of the President of Ukraine Uleg Rybachuk discussed the situation in Ukraine before the elections.

The interlocutors agreed on that all political powers must be consolidated around the idea of carrying out the first honest and democratic elections in Ukraine.

Vitaliy Klychko pointed out that “that the ability of the participants of election race to demonstrate political correctness and realize the European standards of the electoral process is very important for Ukraine today”. 

“The statements by Olexandr Moroz and Yulia Tymoshenko about uselessness of making a new coalition of the “Orange” majority at the future Parliament before the elections prove, that these political parties consider different variants of possible coalition and this can be also a cover for the double game”, one of the civic coalition PORA-ROP leaders Taras Stetskiv stated while commenting on yesterday’s initiatives by the Socialistic party and by the BYT.

“We start!” the leaders of the civic coalition PORA-ROP Vitaliy Klychko, Viktor Pynzenyk and Vladyslav Kaskiv stated today. Everything we had before was rather a preparation for the start, than a false start. So, the critical election stage in life of the civic coalition PORA-ROP began on February 1 with the presentation of the common for both the PORA and the ROP logo and slogan of the campaign.

At first, there was a press-conference in the building of the information agency UNIAN during which the leaders of the coalition made several mission statements and promised to present the detailed program and the aims of the civic coalition at the special briefing on the next Wednesday. The journalists, who were present at the press-conference, were the first to watch a new electoral advert “Tak! Klychko” (“Yes! Klychko!”). Today Ukrainian channels begin to broadcast the PORA-Reforms and Order Party adverts.

The nearer the time of the parliamentary elections, the more discredits and information about possible and already accomplished provocations come to the innocent electorate. The worst thing is that there are lots of attempts to engage into such political confrontations those political powers that have nothing to do with the dirty deals. This can be exemplified by the information the press-service of the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc provided the UNIAN agency with yesterday.

According to this message, 3 days prior to Yulia Tymoshenko’s arrival to Dolyna town in Ivano-Frankivsk province “the preparation under the “Our Ukraine” patronage for the special action during the mass-meeting began”. Yulia Tymoshenko personally announced that in this town and in Ivano-Frankivsk her meeting with electorate was going to be frustrated, and for this sake special people “with PORA symbols” were to be used (the tour of the head of the BYT in Galychyna began yesterday).

“We note with satisfaction that the proposal made to former allies in the “Orange” coalition by PORA-ROP to unconditionally re-unite in the run up to March 26 parliamentary elections has met with wide response from leading “Orange” parties.

Since the Our Ukraine bloc has agreed, to make a new “Orange” coalition possible, to refrain from distributing ministerial portfolios ahead of the elections, PORA-ROP believes there is nothing to stop Yulia Tymoshenko bloc ( BYT),  and other mainstream “Orange” parties from signing the unification agreement. 

PORA-ROP  is stressing hereby that the proposed agreement will not merely be yet another public deal among the allies. It should be rather viewed as a solemn moral commitment to the Ukrainian people to have the unity of revolutionary forces reestablished.”

Today, on January 26, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe at its regular meeting condemned the Holodomor of 1932-1933, having defined it as the crime of the communistic regime against Ukraine. The deputies, who represent the Supreme Council of Ukraine at the meeting of PACE, initiated this decision, which was supported by 85 deputies. Unfortunately, the decision wasn’t represented in the final resolution of the meeting of PACE because it wasn’t supported by the greater part of the deputies, in particular by the Russian delegation.

However, PACE adopted the resolution, which in general condemned the violations of human rights by the communist regimes.