LEONID KUCHMA PROMISES TO “TAKE MEASURES” AGAINST IMPEACHMENT INITIATORS

Progressive Socialist leader Natalia Vitrenko declared on March 31 that her party will shortly raise the issue of impeaching President Kuchma, Interfax-Ukraine reports. A similar statement was made earlier by Communist leader Petro Symonenko.

Kuchma responded to Symonenko’s threat, sounding quite confident. Interfax-Ukraine quotes the President as saying that the authors of the impeachment idea “are well aware themselves that it has no future” and that “the guarantor of the Constitution has adequate means to subdue these initiators, so that they won’t ever raise the matter again.”

Yevhen Marchuk, who said in an interview with Ukrainian Radio that impeaching the President was inexpedient, told The Day that there is no legal framework to initiate impeachment proceedings, because no laws have been passed on its procedures or special impeachment authorities. Even if Parliament approves such elements of law (a bill has already been prepared by the Unity Parliamentary fraction), the President is not likely to sign it, or that Parliament will be able to surmount the last barrier, the Constitutional Court. In other words, Mr. Marchuk explained, Verkhovna Rada may announce impeachment, but this would be, strictly speaking, giving the President a favorable excuse to dissolve Parliament. The more so that the rest of the world would respond calmly to such dissolution, considering Parliament’s Communist dominance and its leaders’ stated anti-Western orientation.