KIEV, October 26 (RIA Novosti) - The parliamentary elections in Ukraine have substituted the country's task of establishing a national dialogue, Director of the Institute for Strategic Research New Ukraine Andriy Yermolaev stated Sunday at the press center of RIA Novosti.
"Unfortunately, these elections have substituted the task that we were facing in summer - a new national dialogue and national compromise. If we achieved this balance, this truce in summer, this election campaign would have been the answer to the question about [our] future. But now this problem has been substituted," Yermolaev said at the round table in the press center of RIA Novosti in Kiev.
According to the institute director, none of the politicians came up with the idea of convergence of the west and the east of the country, no one talked about the east-west coalition.
"Everyone was talking about their future victories. Here we are now reaping the fruits of this," Yermolaev said.
Early parliamentary elections are underway in Ukraine. Ukrainians are going to the polls to vote in 424 members of parliament — 225 of them from party lists and 199 in single-candidate constituencies. The electoral threshold has been set at 5 percent.
The elections are held on the background of a serious political and economic crisis in the country. The Ukrainian authorities have recognized that they cannot hold elections in half of the districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions due to the armed conflict between the Ukrainian security forces and independence supporters of the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics.
