UKRAINIAN President Petro Poroshenko dropped his objections to a referendum on regional autonomy for eastern areas of the country yesterday.

Mr Poroshenko met a parliamentary commission considering a draft constitution and told MPs he was “ready to launch a referendum on state governance if you decide it is necessary.”

The meeting was televised live, as have been a number of recent announcements of government initiatives. Kiev’s refusal to allow residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions to vote on autonomy within Ukraine after the fascist-backed coup in the capital was one of the provocations that sparked the civil war.

Anti-fascist resistance leaders dismissed the president’s gesture as “meaningless,” noting it did not contain any detail on how a vote would be held or who would conduct it.

It “already says a lot” about Kiev’s intentions that no separatist representatives have been invited to sit on the constitutional commission, Donetsk Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Purgin said.

And Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenuk rejected direct talks with the resistance leaders on the issue.

“When we talk about our dialogue with the east, we mean a dialogue with legitimately elected representatives, not Russian gangsters and terrorists,” he declared.

Elections held in Donetsk and Lugansk last November returned current leaders Aleksandr Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky to office with 79 and 63 per cent of the vote respectively, but Kiev refuses to recognise those results.

Mr Poroshenko said he remains opposed to a federal Ukraine — the set-up long fought for by the country’s Communist Party — but would accept “decentralisation” as long as defence, security and foreign policy were decided at national level.

However, he snubbed eastern citizens by insisting that last year’s decision to revoke the status of Russian as an official language was final.

“Ukrainian has been and will be our only state language,” he said — although a third of Ukrainians list Russian as their mother tongue.Mr Purgin said the language issue alone showed the president “doesn’t listen to the voices of the east. We speak Russian here.”

While a ceasefire between the anti-fascists and the government is largely holding, the arrival of Nato troops on “training” missions has raised suspicions about Kiev’s good faith.