About two dozen people are holding a rally near the premises of Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister for Social Policy Affairs Pavlo Rozenko in the village of Pohreby outside Kyiv; the participants were burning tires, the News of Donbas online media said on August 8.
There are people who identify themselves as displaced persons, as well as activists from the Zemlyaki (Fellow Countrymen) public organization, among the participants in the rally, the media said.
The participants set tires on fire and started to extinguish them after a few moments.
Later, on the building’s fence they hung a poster with the factitious ‘Audit report of the material and domestic living conditions of Rozenko’, in which they wrote that this house, totaling Hr 5 million in value, was not mentioned in his tax declaration. The protesters also demand Rozenko’s resignation due to “the inconsistency of his position with his actual income.”
“They decided to hit where it hurts the most, because today they delivered a strike not at me, but at my 75-years-old mother. They struck my mother, who is the owner of that house and lives there. It is a good thing that we took her out of that house yesterday, because we knew that such provocation will happen near the house, in which she has been living for ten years,” he told reporters following a governmental session on August 8.
Rozenko said that he does not need to mention this house in his tax declaration, because he lives separately from his mother and reports only the property of his family and himself.
“It is a part of an information campaign against me, which has been held at least for the last six months. Six months ago, upon the report from the Ukrainian Security Service we stopped payments in the occupied territories for 250,000 people who allegedly were pensioners and received payments. As of today, 150,000 people made requests for renewal the payments,” he said.
In mid-June, dozens of displaced persons from Donbas had already held a picket at the Ukrainian Social Policy Ministry, which Rozenko is in charge of, demanding the annulment of the Cabinet’s decree ‘On Social Payments to Internally Displaced Persons’, which they view as discriminatory.
In particular, the participants in the rally organized by the Zemlyaki public movement brought mattresses, saying they would spend the night at the entrance to the ministry until the administration changed its attitude towards internally displaced persons.
At that time, the protesters insisted on the adoption of a governmental program to provide temporary housing to displaced persons, compensations to internally displaced persons for lost housing (or access to it) and property as a result of hostilities in the special operation zone, the return to displaced persons of the right to vote in elections of all levels of the Ukrainian administration, and also Rozenko’s resignation.
