President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine has submitted a draft law (No 9310) on renaming the Dnipropetrovsk region into the Dnipro region to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine as an urgent one.
“President Poroshenko has sent a draft law to the Verkhovna Rada on making amendments to Article 133 of the Constitution of Ukraine (about renaming the Dnipropetrovsk region). The document stipulates the renaming of the Dnipropetrovsk region into the Dnipro region,” the presidential press service said.
The renaming is to be done in accordance with the Law of Ukraine “On Condemning the Communist and National-Socialist (Nazi) Totalitarian Regimes in Ukraine and on Prohibiting the Propaganda of their Paraphernalia.” The law says, in particular, that names of regions named after leaders of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union belong to the paraphernalia of the Communist totalitarian regime.
“The decommunization needs to be completed. There should be no place on Ukraine’s map for Petrovsky [after which the region is still named now]. Not only was he one of the leaders of the Communist dictatorship, but he also was a co-organizer and executing authority of the Holodomor, genocide of the Ukrainian people,” Poroshenko wrote on Facebook.
The president recalled the procedure to rename a region in Ukraine envisages amendments to the Constitution.
