Who won Oct. 31 elections? Results will be known today – NOV. 5
The Central Election Commission must, by midnight on Nov. 5, announce the results of the Oct. 31 local elections to 15,000 municipal seats, including oblast, city, town and village councils.
The 15-member commission has kept the public in suspense by not posting real-time returns on its website from more than 12,000 territorial election commissions.
A voter casts his ballot at a polling station during local elections in the village of Sofiyivska Borshchahivka, near Kyiv, on Oct. 31.(AP)
Various exit polls showed the pro-presidential Party of Regions has cemented its power on the local level, gaining ground in western and central Ukraine, winning a key mayoral election in Odesa and having one of its own in a close race for mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city after Kyiv.
Kyiv opens three new metro stops on the blue line – NOV. 5
President Viktor Yanukovych will preside over the trial run of three new metro stations southwest of Kyiv, according to the Kyiv City State Administration.
All will be on the blue line (known as Kurenivsko-Chervonoarmiyska). The new Demiyivska, Holosoyivska and Vasylkivska stations will start transporting passengers at full capacity in one month, linking them with Lybidska station, currently the last stop in operation on the line.
City-owned Metrobud started building the 3,804-meter metro tunnel in 2005, but financial problems delayed the project.
The total cost of building the three stations was more than Hr 2 billion, according to the Kyiv City State Administration.
The area, known as Teremyky, has a huge traffic bottleneck. Many new buildings have sprung up in the past five years while Kyiv municipal authorities failed to keep pace with infrastructure improvements.
Communists still celebrate Lenin – NOV. 7
A Communist Party supporter shouts in front of Vladimir Lenin’s monument in Kyiv on Nov. 27, 2009, during a rally to celebrate its reconstruction after vandalism. (AFP)
Geopolitically conflicted Ukraine will witness how the Communist Party of Ukraine commemorates the 93-year anniversary of the October Revolution in which Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin orchestrated a coup d’etat over the Russian government in 1917.
Ukraine’s communists will gather 11 a.m. on Nov. 7 near Besarabsky Square next to Kyiv’s Lenin statue on Shevchenko Street.
Their march will culminate at European Square, where a rally and concert are planned.
Financed by the German government, which knew that Lenin wanted to withdraw Russia from World War I, the Bolsheviks and their private Red Guard army succeeded in easily overthrowing a weak and unpopular provisional government ruling the ailing nation in place of Czar Nicholas II, who abdicated earlier in the year.
The Bolshevik uprising plunged Russia into civil war. This led briefly to a short-lived independent Ukrainian state until Red forces took over, creating the Union of Social Soviet Republics, which lasted from 1922 until 1991.
On Oct. 2, Ukraine’s parliament rejected a proposal to make Nov. 7 a national holiday.
Only three other lawmakers in the Ukrainian legislature besides the 26 Communist Party members supported the idea.
