According to a preliminary assessment, the Verkhovna Rada and its speaker remain the only legitimate authorities in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said while answering questions from journalists in Uzbekistan.
“Strictly speaking, according to a preliminary assessment, the only legitimate authorities (in Ukraine – editor’s note) are parliament and the speaker of the Rada. Basically, if they wanted to hold presidential elections, then they would have had to cancel the law on martial law, that’s all. To hold elections, but they did not want to do it,” Vladimir Putin said, TASS quoted him as saying.
The Russian leader noted that Ukraine’s constitution provides for the extension of parliament’s powers during martial law, but not the president’s.
“There is Article 111 of the Ukrainian constitution, which says that in this case the powers of the supreme power, actually presidential powers, are transferred to the speaker of parliament,” the president clarified.
The head of state also emphasised that the intention of the “Ukrainian masters” is that the burden of unpopular decisions should be borne by the current Kiev authorities.
“I think, and this has nothing to do with the Constitution, that maybe the idea of today’s masters of Ukraine, they are behind the ocean, is to put the burden of making all unpopular decisions on the current executive power,” Putin said.
Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the Western ideas of the new world order hypocrisy. According to him, they are aimed solely at preserving the neo-colonial system, showing their essence in the form of “hypocrisy, double standards and claims”.