Moscow, Nov 21 (IANS): Five Ukrainian parties, including President Petro Poroshenko's Bloc and the National Front of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Friday signed an agreement to form a parliamentary coalition backing the new government.
The coalition, which will become official next Thursday during the opening session of the newly-elected Rada (Parliament), also includes the Self Reliance Party, the Radical Party of Oleg Liashko and Batkivshchyna of former prime minister Yulia Timoshenko, Efe news agency reported.
The new coalition will have a sufficient majority to reform the constitution, said Vitali Kovalchuk of Petro Poroshenko's Bloc, cited by Russian media.
The five parties have 288 of the 450 seats in Parliament, although in the elections held on Oct 26 only 421 deputies were chosen because the war-torn separatist regions of Donetsk and Lugansk in the east of the country boycotted the poll.
The draft agreement will be presented Friday, coinciding with the first anniversary of the start of the Maidan protests, the revolt that ended with a shift of power in Kiev.
It also coincides with the visit by US Vice President Joe Biden to Ukraine.
In the final version of the draft agreement, participants in the ruling coalition commit themselves to investigating the killing of protesters on Kiev’s Independence Square in February 2014, TASS reported citing Unian news agency reported.
They also vowed to abolish parliamentary immunity.
“We will ensure equality of all state officials before the law, restrict all kinds of immunity against criminal prosecution. We will be open and accountable to the society, and will be guided in our activity only by law, that is why we will abolish parliamentary immunity,” said the preamble to the document.
"We see our main task in ensuring defence potentials of Ukraine, economic growth, protection of rights and freedoms of our citizens,” it stated.
It also lists among the tasks, “protection of legal interests of Crimean Tatars, all Ukrainian citizens living on a temporarily occupied territory of Crimea and Sevastopol, parts of the Lugansk and Donetsk region, and liberation of these territories”.
The document says the implementation of the association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union will be the basis of reforms in Ukraine.
"We will carry out reforms designed to achieve European quality of life for Ukrainian citizens, do away with poverty, develop a competitive economy, have a stable development of the society, favourable conditions for business, new jobs and decline in unemployment, as well as to obtain energy independence, develop the civil society, ensure freedom of speech, fight corruption and restore justice, develop education and science, culture and spirituality,” the preamble states.