You're reading: War’s displaced voters cannot participate in Oct. 25 elections

Donetsk journalist Oleksiy Matsuka covered his mouth with a card that displays his name and home city of Donetsk as he posed for a photograph to protest his inability to vote in the Oct. 25 local elections.


Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians displaced by Russia’s war against Ukraine face the same situation.

In Ukrainian, they are pereselentsi
internally displaced people. And consequently, they will have no voice
in choosing their local leaders.

For the most part, people who fled Russian-annexed Crimea and
Kremlin-separatist parts of eastern Ukraine don’t have official registration at
their new homes, and thus they cannot vote there, under restrictions in place
since Soviet times.

Although Ukraine’s Constitutional Court in 2001 found such Soviet-style
legislation to be unconstitutional, Ukrainians must still have stamps with
residence data in their passports. Now it remains a tool for deciding whether
the person has voting rights or not.

“So a Soviet norm of registration puts an end to” the rights of
Ukrainian citizens, Matsuka said.

Matsuka had to leave Donetsk for Kyiv in April 2014 after getting death
threats. But to be registered in Kyiv, he has to establish permanent residence.
A home is too expensive to buy for him as it is for most others on the run or
newly relocated.

As of late September, Ukraine officially had more than 1.2 million
internally displaced people, or IDPs.

But Andriya Mahera, deputy head of Central Election Commission, said
that the displaced people have nothing to complain about.

“Nobody deprived IDPs of their voting rights, they just demand more
rights than the rest of Ukrainians,” Mahera said. “Only those who registered at
their new location, will be able to vote. The law cannot have exceptions.”

For Volodymyr Golovin and his wife, Lydmyla, an elderly couple who left
the embattled Volnovakha in Donetsk Oblast last year and settled in Vitove of
Cherkasy Oblast, registration wasn’t a problem. So they plan to vote on Oct.
25.

“We just need to go and register at the village council… We have never
had any problems with this,” Lyudmyla Golovina told the Kyiv Post.

But many people do not want to change their permanent residence because
they fear it could cut their ties to their property in Russian-occupied
territories.

Olha Aivazovska, head of OPORA election watchdog, said Ukraine could
allow such voters to bypass the Soviet era requirements and simply let them case
ballots based on work documents or rental lease. That option was available
until 2010.

Aivazovska said the non-government organizations proposed this method of
voting, but that such initiatives have been blocked in parliament, mainly from
lawmakers in the ruling coalition led by President Petro Poroshenko and Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

“The lawmakers, especially from the presidential bloc and partly from
(Yatsenyuk’s) People’s
Front, are against this because they believe the IDPs
will vote for the Opposition Bloc” that includes allies of ousted
President Viktor Yanukovych.

Matsuka agrees and blames politicians for putting their interests ahead
of people’s voting rights. “The voters are needed only when the parties are
sure these votes will be in their favor,” he said.

Crimea and the eastern Donbas, the industrial base where Yanukovych was
from, have always been the strongholds for the former president’s Party of
Regions. Their successors from the Opposition Bloc continue to have high
ratings in the Donbas now, with 21 percent of support compared to a mere 3
percent for the presidential party.

Oleksandr Chernenko, a lawmaker with Poroshenko’s bloc, called these
accusations “baseless,” blaming a parliamentary committee for not preparing the
draft laws on time. “If the authorities had been afraid to lose these votes,
then they would have deprived the IDPs of voting rights in the last
presidential and parliamentary elections, which are more important than the
local ones,” he said.

Despite natural skepticism over the ability of Ukrainian authorities to
hold free and democratic elections in territory they don’t control, Mykhailo
Okhendovsky, head of the Central Election Commission, said on Oct. 6 that ways
are being discussed to allow the IDPs to vote in elections on separatist-held
territory next year.

Matsuka doesn’t think it will be possible. “Do they suggest us to come
back to Donetsk, where many want to kill us?” he asked.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenkocan be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv Post staff writer Veronika Melkozerova contributed to this report.