No fights: new Ukrainian Parliament starts working

The first official meeting of Ukraine’s newly-elected parliament took place on August 29.

The session began at 10 a.m. Thursday and concluded already at 2.30 a.m. Friday.

Over 60 high ranking and international guests took part in the official meeting of the new Verkhovna Rada.

According to the parliamentary rules Andrii Parubii, the Head of the Verkhovna Rada of the previous convocation, invited the newly elected MPs to take an oath and to give the floor to read the oath to the eldest MP — Yulii Ioffe, the MP form the Opposition Platform – For Life Party.

The new parliament will have 424 MPs instead of 450 since elections were temporarily not held in Crimea and in some areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

According to the CEC, the largest faction in the Rada is Servant of the People, which has 254 MPs elected both from the list and by majority districts. 43 seats belong to the Opposition Platform — For Life, 26 – to Batkivshchyna, 25 – to European Solidarity, 20 — to Golos party, 6 – to the Opposition Bloc.

Ukraine parliament appoints 35-year-old lawyer Oleksii Honcharuk as a new Prime Minister. He is the youngest PM in the history of Ukraine.

Ivan Bakanov, who directed Zelenskyi’s campaign, was named the chief of Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU.

Dmytro Razumkov, who served as Zelenskyi’s campaign adviser and later became the leader of his party, was elected parliamentary speaker.

The Rada also approved the new foreign minister, Vadym Pristaiko, who previously served as Ukraine’s ambassador to Canada and later its envoy to NATO.

Speaking to lawmakers, Pristaiko pledged to push for settling the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where fighting between Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces have killed more than 13,000 people since 2014. «We need peace and stability,» he said.

Andrii Zahorodniuk, who was named defense minister, pledged to streamline the military and free it of graft.

«Everyone knows that they steal in the army,» he said. «People have grown tired of those problems.»

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi congratulated the people’s deputies on taking office and urged them to work efficiently.

“Let’s work. People are waiting. Less SMS, more laws. We are all waiting… It’s so unusual», — admitted Zelenskyi.

The President emphasized that the Verkhovna Rada of the IX convocation would go down in history, and the activity of the people’s deputies would define the memories of this parliament.

“It is already clear that the Parliament of this convocation will go down in history. The question is — how exactly? You have every chance of getting into the textbooks as the Parliament that has done the incredible, that has implemented everything that hadn’t been done in the previous 28 years,” — Volodymyr Zelenskyi noted.

The next session of the Parliament is slated for September 3.

As we reported earlier, no military parade: Ukraine marks Independence Day.