The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine has refused to support the bills, which proposed to deprive the Cabinet of Ministers of the authority to set the amount of pensions and social benefits to Chornobyl cleanup workers and secure the respective sizes in the law on the status and social protection of citizens affected by the Chornobyl disaster.
According to an Interfax-Ukraine reporter, none of the relevant draft laws (No. 4442 and No. 4442-1) received the required 226 votes of people’s deputies at a plenary meeting of parliament on Thursday, April 19.
The authors of the first legislative initiative were MPs from Oleh Liashko’s Radical Party faction. In the current plenary week, they blocked the parliamentary rostrum in the session hall of the Verkhovna Rada several times, insisting on the consideration of this bill.
The authors of the second bill were MPs from the Opposition Bloc faction.
The draft laws proposed determining in the law on the status of social protection for people affected by the Chornobyl disaster the amounts of monthly additional pensions for harm to health, as well as minimum pension payments that these citizens should receive. According to the current wording of this law, the procedure and amounts of such payments are set by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.
In particular, lawmakers proposed paying from Hr 683 to Hr 1,373 in monthly supplementary pension to persons who belong to the first category of those affected by the Chornobyl disaster.
People’s deputies also proposed establishing that in all cases, pensions for people disabled due to the Chornobyl disaster cannot be less than Hr 13,730 for the first group of disability, Hr 10,984 for the second group and Hr 8,938 for the third group. The issue concerns those who tackled the consequences of the Chornobyl accident, as well as those evacuated from the exclusion zone, and those disabled since childhood who have reached adulthood.
According to the explanatory note to one of the bills, according to the calculations of the pension fund, the additional costs for the implementation of such a bill will amount to Hr 433 million monthly.
First Deputy Chairwoman of the Verkhovna Rada Iryna Gerashchenko, during the discussion of these bills, emotionally opposed the adoption of these initiatives, explaining this by the fact that they are populist and not realizable in the current situation.
