Ukrainian MPs form coalition to reclaim Russian Kuban region
13 members of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, have created an interparty coalition called “Kuban”. The new group will work on the return of Ukrainian ethnic territories and ethnic Ukrainians to the cultural and social field, MP Oleksiy Honcharenko, elected head of the union, wrote on Facebook.
“First and foremost, we will work on Kuban. But other regions that are densely inhabited by Ukrainians will also be under our close attention,” Honcharenko wrote.
The MP also published a copy of a request to Rada Chairman Dmytro Razumkov, asking him to announce the founding of the new group at a plenary session.
Volodymyr Omelyan, Minister of Infrastructure during Petro Poroshenko’s term as president, has spoken before about the need to restore Kuban, a region of southern Russia, to Ukraine. “We will restore air traffic with Russia only after the return of Crimea, eastern Ukraine and, I hope, Kuban,” the minister said in May 2017. At the same time, Omelyan said that Kyiv was also expecting Russia to return “other Ukrainian territories that were captured by Russia at one time”.