UKRAINE’S SECOND LARGEST MINING UNION DEMANDS CABINET RESIGNATION.

The Independent Trade Union of Coal Miners of Ukraine has demanded resignation of the Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko and turned to parliament for support (Itar-Tass, September 14). Meanwhile, another five mines joined the strike initiated earlier by four mines of the Pavlohradvuhillya (Pavlograd coal) company, demanding wage arrears due for several months. Miners from Pavlohrad began a march on Donetsk to instigate local miners there to join them (izvestia-Ukraina, September 15).

Calling for the government resignation, Ukraine’s second largest mining union in fact supports the leftist opposition in parliament, consisting of communists, socialists and former premier Pavlo Lazarenko’s Hromada Union in their persistent calls for resignation of the government. Pustovoytenko and Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma earlier indirectly accused Lazarenko of instigating miners’ unrest in Lazarenko and Kuchma’s native Dnipropetrovsk Region in May – June this year, which ended in the miners’ march to Kyiv and resignation of the coal industry minister Stanislav Yanko. Miners’ strikes provoked cabinet resignations in Ukraine in 1993, when a mining director from the Donbass Yukhym Zvyahylskiy became acting premier and in May of 1996, when Kuchma fired Lazarenko’s predecessor in the post of premier, Yevhen Marchuk.–OV

U.S. SIXTH FLEET FLAGSHIP CALLS AT POTI.