On August 26, the Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs,...

On August 26, the Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs, Yuriy Kravchenko said Ukraine would be ready for life imprisonment of convicts sentenced to capital punishment in two years if 50m hryvnyas were invested in development of the Ukrainian penitentiary system. According to him, creation of prisons with a closed cycle [as received] will be the first step to it. At the same time, Kravchenko stressed that the issue of the abolition of the death penalty contained a number of factors - psychological, political and socioeconomic - and required "tremendous reform work and will be implemented in the third millennium." Investments in the development of the penitentiary system would first of all mean the possibility to modernize prisons. Kravchenko also called for the setting up in Ukraine of institutions, which would propagate replacement of the death penalty by other kinds of punishment and create a preventive mechanism, which would work for a human being."v