President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky introduced a bill amending the country’s constitution into the Verkhovna Rada, which does not mention the special status of Sevastopol. The text of the document was published on the official website of the Verkhovna Rada.
The document reserved the special status only for the Ukrainian capital – Kyiv and the status of Sevastopol is not mentioned.
“The current administrative-territorial division of Ukraine was developed back in USSR and today it is explicitly obsolete and cumbersome. The existing administrative-territorial basis of local self-government does not meet the requirements of social and economic development and effective management as well”, – the explanatory note to the law emphasized.
Anton Korynevich, Permanent Representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, claimed via his Facebook page that Ukraine should not grant special status to any cities.
“At the same time, it was precisely the special legal status of Sevastopol that in fact became one of the reasons of the occupation of the peninsula in 2014. In fact, Sevastopol itself became a basis for deploying a military base of a foreign state on the territory of Ukraine, later it was used to capture our lands and provoking the war, international armed conflict and the further occupation of parts of the territory of our state”, – claimed Korynevich.