LUHANSK, Ukraine – Antonina Melnykova comes to work every day wearing comfortable trainers so that she can run as fast as she can, if necessary. She has good reason.
As head of a district election commission in Luhansk Oblast, infected by Kremlin-backed separatists, she has been threatened by armed men. She even saw a colleague get briefly kidnapped.
All the attacks have happened since the start of May, and appear to be part of the insurgents’ attempts to disrupt Ukraine’s presidential elections on May 25 in Luhansk and neighboring Donetsk Oblasts, potentially disenfranchising 15 percent of Ukraine’s population.
Melnykova has headed an election commission in Lysychansk, an industrial city in Luhansk, 10 times before. This is the first time she has been worried about whether the election will take place.
“Many people have already turned down work at election commissions fearing for their safety,” she said. “I don’t know if we will manage to assemble the necessary quorum.”
While Ukraine’s government and its Western allies pin high hopes on the May 25 vote, many eastern cities remain under partial control by armed separatists. This brings daily risks to election organizers.
After declaring the People’s Republic of Luhansk Republic this month, the armed separatists have said that they will not allow presidential elections. “It would be stupid to hold them now,” their spokesman Vasily Nikitin said.
But in the Lysychansk election office, where a big Ukrainian flag is pinned to the wall, five election commission members lean over their tables. Despite the separatist statements, they continue preparing elections in district #110, which encompasses several cities.
On May 8, Melnykova and her colleagues had to urgently vacate this office, housed in a pre-school children’s center, when six men armed with Kalashnikovs stormed the building.
“Thank God we had been warned about that attack and managed to run away. Many commissions were stormed on May 8 by separatists,” she said, following a similar attack on May 5.
The attackers came from the local branch of the Communist Party. Armed pro-Russian militants wearing orange-and-black St. George’s ribbons, the separatists’ insignia, live in that office. Another group of separatists, former Afghan war veterans, took over a bank office nearby recently.
But the scariest moment took place in the city of Popasna, some 45 kilometers from Lysychansk. A meeting with local election officials was cut short by several dozen young men who stormed into the office, shouting that there will be no presidential election in Popasna. They then destroyed documents and threatened the staff.
“These young people accused all those present there of betrayal of the people of the Luhansk Republic,” said Olena Pokhodenko, a commission member. The staffers were allowed to go free, except for Serhiy Lozovy. “Initially they threatened to take me to Luhansk or Sloviansk, but then just kept me for a while saying they were waiting for some order,” Lozovy recalled about his kidnapping. He was released after a couple of hours, but was forced to write a statement that he had no complaints about his abduction.
Since then, Melnykova said, the commission hasn’t met in Popasna. “I think we will not have elections there,” she said.
On May 14, armed militants kidnapped the head of district election commission in Kramatorsk in Donetsk Oblast. Just a day later, election headquarters in the cities of Krasny Luch and Antratsyt were stormed.
On May 15, parliament adopted a number of changes to election legislation to make the work of the commissions safer, ordering the police and the SBU to guard election offices 10 days prior to the vote. Election staff are also allowed to relocate to safer locations.
“But of course these measures won’t solve the problem,” said Oleksandr Chernenko, head of Committee of Voters of Ukraine, an election watchdog. He said that even observers from his organization need to hide in Lugansk and Donetsk Oblasts.
Melnykova believes the local police officers won’t be able to protect the elections. “They come here for our meetings and openly admit that they are not going to get involved,” she said.
She has received calls from the self-proclaimed government of the Luhansk Republic and even was invited to meet its leader, Valery Bolotov. She refused. “I’m not afraid of them,” Melnykova said. “If we get scared there will be nothing good here.”
Others aren’t so brave. One school director cancelled elections in her school for safety reasons, just days after another school director was kidnapped on May 14 and held for a few hours. She was terrorized because she refused to allow the illegal secession referendum on her premises three days earlier.
But Melnykova says she will insist that a polling station operates in the school.
“You know, in our city of 130,000 people, there are just several hundred of those who run around waving Russian flags. I really hope that the majority here are sensible people,” she said. “But I don’t know if they have enough courage to come for these presidential elections.”
Editor’s Note: This article has been produced with support from the project www.mymedia.org.ua, financially supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, and implemented by a joint venture between NIRAS and BBC Media Action.The content in this article may not necessarily reflect the views of the Danish government, NIRAS and BBC Action Media.
