“The Party of Regions has a great experience in organizing elections and manipulating the results. That’s what the results of the Constitutional court in December 2004 show. It is evident that Kivalov’s (former head of Central Election Committee, accused of falsification – ed.) experience will be used during conduct of SMS referendum on giving a status of the second state language to Russian,” the first deputy head of the Central executive committee of “Our Ukraine” Ihor Zhdanov commented on the initiative of the Party of Regions to hold SMS-referendum on giving a status of the second state language to Russian.
“We do not have any doubts that they will manipulate the results of this poll. We are also sure that the results will be changed in a notorious way because one of members of the Party of Regions Serhiy Kivalov has a great experience in such affairs,” said Zhdanov.
“We are for development of languages of all nationalities in Ukraine. But one of items of our pre-election program is an attempt to protect the status of Ukrainian as the state language. We really have a great problem of development of the Ukrainian language, while the problem of Russian language is artificial,” he noted.
“On the eve of the presidential elections the Regions used to intimidate everyone that Yushchenko would close all Russian schools. Everybody knows that it does not happen and will not happen,” Zhdanov said.
“The Party of Regions keeps creating a language problem artificially ahead the elections,” Ihor Zhdanov said.
