Rally Against Gas Price Hike For Ukrainian Households Underway In Kiev

Rally Against Gas Price Hike for Ukrainian Households Underway in Kiev

A rally organized by the Ukrainian pro-European party Fatherland (Batkivshchyna), headed by the country's former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, to protest the planned increase in gas prices for households started on Wednesday near the presidential administration building, a Sputnik correspondent reported.

KIEV (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 24th October, 2018) A rally organized by the Ukrainian pro-European party Fatherland (Batkivshchyna), headed by the country's former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, to protest the planned increase in gas prices for households started on Wednesday near the presidential administration building, a Sputnik correspondent reported.

On October 19, the Ukrainian cabinet approved the 23.5-percent increase in gas prices for households starting November 1 in line with the requirements of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under its financial support scheme. The new price will be 8,500 hryvnias (over $300) per cubic meter. This prompted Timoshenko to call on Ukrainian lawmakers to urge the country's President Petro Poroshenko to abandon this decision, which she qualified as a "genocide."

The protesters are currently gathering at the junction between the Institutska street and the Bankova street, where the presidential administration building is located, while the passage to the administration building has been blocked by police. Several dozens of protesters are standing near the Ukrainian government's building at the Hrushevsky street, as they are waiting for the lawmakers to arrive there.

The rally organizers are delivering speeches, using sound reinforcement systems. The protesters are holding flags of the Fatherland party, as well as posters with slogans calling for canceling the gas prices increase. They are also shouting out slogans urging the government to resign.

Security measures have been boosted in the center of Kiev, with many police officers and National Guard officers being on duty in the vicinity of the presidential administration building. The roadway of the Institutska street has been closed in the area where the rally is being held. No incidents have been reported.

Since 2013, gas prices for Ukrainian households had increased by 1,180 percent, according to Viktor Medvedchuk, the leader of the opposition Ukrainian Choice movement.

Under the IMF's $17.5 billion Extended Fund Facility assistance package, which is a part of a four-year program aimed at reviving the Ukrainian economy, Kiev has been receiving loans since March 2015. It has already received four tranches of credit and expected to receive the fifth one in December 2017, however, it has not been allocated so far since Kiev has not met all the IMF requirements, with one of them consisting in the necessity to adjust the country's gas prices with external market rates.

On October 19, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman announced that Kiev and the IMF had agreed on a $3.9 billion stand-by agreement for 2019.