Vladimir Gontar/UNIAN
Petro Poroshenko takes the oath of office as Ukraine’s president on June 7.
As if the fighting in Ukraine’s east was not enough, in mid-July came reports that a Malaysia Airlines flight with 298 passengers and crew aboard was downed in Ukraine, some 35 miles from the border with Russia. The Boeing 777 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. A Ukrainian Internal Affairs Ministry adviser, Anton Herashchenko, claimed the plane had been shot down by a ground-to-air missile. Both Ukrainian and Russian authorities denied shooting down the Malaysian passenger aircraft. President Poroshenko called the July 17 incident a terrorist act, and a statement on the presidential website noted: “…In recent days, this has become the third tragic accident following AN-26 and SU-25 aircrafts of the Ukrainian armed forces downed from the Russian territory. We do not exclude that this aircraft was also attacked and emphasize that the armed forces of Ukraine have not taken any actions to strike targets in the air. …All possible search-and-rescue operations are being carried out. President Poroshenko addressed the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine to set up an Emergency State Commission for the thorough investigation of this tragedy. The president has invited the ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] and other international experts including Dutch and Malaysian representatives to join the investigation efforts. …”
U.S. intelligence officials said on July 22 that they believe pro-Russian rebels probably shot down the Malaysia airliner over eastern Ukraine “by mistake.” According to RFE/RL, they said the passenger jet was likely downed by an SA-11 surface-to-air missile fire by the rebels. While saying there was no direct link so far to the Kremlin, the officials said Russia had “created the conditions” for the downing of the plane. Search and retrieval operations at the crash site were hampered by the ongoing war in Ukraine’s east. In November, Dutch authorities said recovery workers in the rebel-controlled region had begun to collect debris from the crash. The operation was being carried out under the supervision of Dutch investigators and officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Debris was first collected at a location near the crash site before being taken to Kharkiv and then to the Netherlands, as most of those killed were Dutch.
Back in Kyiv, the Cabinet of Ministers resigned and the majority coalition in the Verkhovna Rada collapsed on July 24. Prime Minister Yatsenyuk blamed the government’s collapse on the failure of Parliament’s pro-EU factions to support emergency measures to finance the state budget and conduct serious natural gas reforms. Earlier that day, the UDAR and the Svoboda parties declared they were abandoning the parliamentary coalition. Mr. Yatsenyuk said, “It’s unacceptable that the coalition has collapsed, that bills haven’t been voted on and there’s nothing to pay soldiers, police, doctors, fill up APCs, the decision hasn’t been made to fill Ukrainian natural gas tanks survive the winter and to free ourselves from dependence on Russian gas.” He added: “When one coalition falls apart, the prime minister begins the procedure of forming a new coalition, which means that he is supposed to take the Communists and Party of Regions. I won’t do that any under any circumstances. The second, if there isn’t a new coalition and the current one collapsed, requires the government and prime minister to resign. I declare my resignation in relation to the collapse of the coalition and blocking of government initiatives.”
Also that week, the parliamentary faction of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) was liquidated as part of a broader campaign to outlaw the party after ample evidence surfaced that it had cooperated with the Russian government in its annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas. A parliamentary majority of 232 national deputies voted on July 22 to approve legislation that created a membership quota for factions and provided for their liquidation if the quota was not met. The new rule directly applied to the Communist faction, which had been hemorrhaging national deputies since the Russian invasion began in March. “Its deputies have run away from it, people in the country have turned their backs on them,” National Deputy Viacheslav Kyrylenko, the bill’s sponsor, told the Rada. “That’s why we’re now simply required to fulfill this formality and give the parliamentary head the ability to simply introduce regulatory order.” President Poroshenko signed the bill the same day, and it became law on July 24, when it was published in the Parliament’s newspaper, enabling Verkhovna Rada Chair Turchynov to declare the CPU faction’s liquidation from the seventh convocation that morning. “It is a historic event,” he said. “I hope that there won’t be any Communist factions in the Ukrainian Parliament anymore.”