New President calls for parliament to be disbanded

DPA, 20TH MAY, 2019 - Immediately after being inaugurated as Ukraine’s president on Monday, volodymyr Zelensky called for the national parliament to be disbanded.

“I dissolve the Verkhovna Rada of the eighth convocation,” Zelensky told the legislature, demanding snap elections. Many of the members have connections with the former president.

Zelensky, 41, was previously a television actor who campaigned as an alternative to a political establishment that has long struggled with entrenched corruption.

Never before having held a political office, Zelensky came to fame with his role as a fictional president on a popular TV show, “servant of the People.”

He won the run-off election against thenincumbent president Petro Poroshenko last month in a landslide, with about threequarters of the votes.

Poroshenko, swept to power by a pro-western revolution five years ago, led Ukraine through its toughest post-soviet period, marked by a pro-russian separatist rebellion in the country’s east.

Amid the conflict, which has claimed about 13,000 lives, according to UN estimates, Poroshenko appeared slow in enacting reforms promised in his rise to power.

In his inauguration speech, Zelensky said his administration’s top priority would be to restore peace to eastern

Ukraine.