You're reading: Yanukovych’s former allies win local elections in Donbas region

MARIUPOL, Ukraine – The embattled eastern Donbas region has once again voted for the same old crowd – former members of the party of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych.

When casting their ballots, locals explained that in choosing between two evils, they selected the familiar one.

The Opposition Bloc party, formed by the former members of now disgraced Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, took the majority of the vote in all of the big cities in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that the Ukrainian government controls.

The cities of Mariupol and Krasnoarmiysk, where elections were held on Nov. 29, after the votes failed a month ago on claims of mass fraud, only reaffirmed the trend.

In Mariupol, the Azov Sea port of almost 500,000 people, the largest Donbas city under Ukraine rule, residents chose as their mayor Vadym Boychenko, the top human resources manager of the Illich steel mill, which is in turn owned by Ukraine’s richest billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, a former sponsor of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

Boychenko, 38, won in the first round, receiving over 72 percent of vote – more than he expected to get on Oct. 25.

“The new communal tariffs were imposed since then, which only improved our chances,” Vitaly Kysil, head of Boychenko’s election campaign, told the Kyiv Post.

Akhmetov’s Metinvest steel corporation has some 40,000 employees in Mariupol, with about the same number of people now unemployed in the city.

“He (Boychenko) is out guy, he works at Illich (steel mill),” said nurse Liudmyla Kovtun, 67, after leaving the polling station. “The plants are the most important thing for us.”

The Opposition Bloc party, which is now sponsored by Akhmetov, received an overwhelming majority of seats in Mariupol’s city council with 45, according to the Central Election Commission.

Five seats were won by the People’s Force party, led by the local environmentalist Maxim Borodin, who organized thousands of residents for a rally against air pollution in 2012 that forced Akhmetov to install new filters at his local plants. The Our Land party, with the city’s former mayor Yury Khotlubey topping its party list, won four seats in the city council.

In Donetsk Oblast’s Krasnoarmiysk, a city of almost 65,000 residents, the mayoral post was won by Oleksiy Trebushkin, the former mayor of the town of Dimitrov and an ex-member of the Party of Regions. Trebushkin, 40, who had been in Yanukovych’s party since 2008, received almost 84 percent of the vote according to the Central Election Commission.

Trebushkin openly criticized the Euromaidan Revolution that drove Yanukovych from power in late February 2014.

When Russian-backed separatists took over Dimitrov last year, he claimed he was on vacation.

The official vote count for the Krasnoarmiysk city council were not available as this story went to press, but a parallel vote count by the Opora election watchdog showed that the Revival party received over 58 percent of the seats in the city legislature. Revival, also now an asylum for former Yanukovych supporters, is also reportedly backed by oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, the former governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

Ukrainian and foreign observers reported minor violations during the votes in Mariupol and Krasnoarmiysk, but said they wouldn’t have affected the election outcome.

But Pavlo Zhebrivsky, the head of the Donetsk Military and Civil Administration, slammed the election results in the two cities as having been influenced by business owners. “The vote went ahead actually through the enterprises – it was done by force,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]