The experts replied to Hennadii Moskal’s claim that decentralisation seems to have created mechanisms for Zakarpattia’s separation.

"The head of the Oblast State Administration, who has screwed up all the work on decentralisation in the Zakarpattia Oblast, now narrates: “The Law on National Minorities, signed by Leonid Kravchuk, stated that the state guarantees the possibility for the national minorities to create autonomies (...) If he had well learnt the constitutional law, read the Ukrainian Constitution, the Law "On Voluntary Amalgamation of Hromadas" and fulfilled his powers in Zakarpattia, there would have been no such problems. Hromadas cannot be separatists and autonomists a priori, though rayons and oblasts can, and the oblast council has already indulged itself in this during Moskal’s tenure. Instead of implementing decentralisation in hromadas that sews the country, he played down to the oblast council regarding autonomy,” wrote Anatolii Tkachuk, expert on local self-government reform and territorial organization of power, on his Facebook page.

As of May 2019, only the Zakarpattia Oblast does not have an acting Perspective Plan for the formation of hromadas’ territories. At the same time, in the course of the reform in Ukraine, about 900 AHs were formed. Of these, 806 AHs have already switched to direct interbudgetary relations with the state budget: they form and execute hromada budget themselves, take care of education, healthcare, administrative, communal, social, cultural services, etc. on their territory. None of amalgamated hromadas displayed signs of separatism or declared their intention to autonomise.

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