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Ukraine's Yanukovych urges rallies if opposition demands unmet-1

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Ukraine's opposition leader called on his supporters all over the country to start rallies if the "orange" parliamentary coalition fails to meet his party's demands.
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KIEV, July 1 (RIA Novosti) - Ukraine's opposition leader called on his supporters all over the country to start rallies if the "orange" parliamentary coalition fails to meet his party's demands.

Viktor Yanukovych's pro-Russian Party of Regions that won the largest share of votes in the March 26 parliamentary elections has been blocking the rostrum in parliament for a few days in protest against the "orange" coalition's refusal to grant it the key posts in any parliamentary committees.

"We call on our voters to be prepared for rallies if the 'orange' coalition continues to violate human rights, laws and the Ukrainian constitution," Yanukovych told a forum of 1,400 parliamentarians of all levels in Dnepropetrovsk in pro-Russian eastern Ukraine.

On June 22, the trio of "orange" parties - the pro-presidential Our Ukraine bloc, the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc and the Socialists who swept Viktor Yushchenko to presidency in 2004 - signed a coalition deal. The Party of Regions that had been frozen out of negotiations on the deal, was provided with no senior posts in parliament or government under the agreement.

The sides in the coalition agreed to appoint ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a prominent figure in the "orange revolution" whose recent career has courted controversy, to the post of prime minister, and Petro Poroshenko, a businessman and former secretary of Ukraine's Security Council, as parliamentary speaker.

"The Party of Regions advocates a new system of effective power, in which the opposition ... must have an instrument of effective control over the authorities," Yanukovych said.

He added that if the coalition trio failed to meet the opposition's demands, "we will dissolve parliament and seek new elections."

"We will not vote for the candidacies proposed by the 'orange coalition'," Yanukovych said. "We will not take part in the voting at all."

Yanukovych, however, welcomed an initiative that President Yushchenko, his former rival in Ukraine's 2004 presidential elections, put forward on Thursday to bring all parliamentary forces to a negotiating table.

"The president's initiative on holding round table talks is timely and aimed to resolve the conflict in the Supreme Rada, which emerged after some political parties attempted to violate parliament's regulations," he said.

The Party of Regions said it planned to convene another similar forum of legislators from western and central Ukrainian regions in Zhitomir in central Ukraine later on Saturday.

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