The Kremlin staged elections in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts on Nov. 11, formally installing in the area leaders put in place earlier.
Ukraine and its Western allies condemned the poll, which was held violation of the commitments Moscow made in the Minsk peace protocol of February 2015: According to that agreement, elections in the Donbas are to be held in accordance with Ukrainian law, and be monitored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.
The OSCE was not permitted to monitor the voting. Instead the Kremlin brought in a motley collection of European fringe and far-right politicians who said they would monitor the poll.
Workers for Kremlin-controlled media reported on the elections, but practically no journalists from reputable independent media were allowed into the Russian-controlled areas to observe the voting.
One exception was Valeria Costa-Kostritsky, a French journalist based in London and Moscow, who reported on Twitter from the Russian-controlled area that journalists were not allowed to visit polling stations unsupervised.
U.S. Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, in some of his strongest comments since taking up his post in July 2017, slammed the poll as an attempt to legitimize the Kremlin’s administration of part of the Donbas it has occupied militarily.
“The people in eastern Ukraine will be better off within a unified Ukraine at peace rather than in a second-rate police state run by crooks and thugs, all subsidized by Russian taxpayers,” Volker tweeted on Nov. 11.
“The so-called ‘People’s Republics’ have no place in the Minsk agreements and are illegitimate tools supported by Russia’s military might and created by Russia to administer Ukrainian territory it controls by force,” Volker added.
Russia still denies that it intervened militarily in eastern Ukraine in April 2014 and provides military and economic support to the areas of Ukraine it controls, but large amounts of evidence gathered over years by journalists and the OSCE show these denials to be false.
Ahead of the poll in the Russian-occupied Donbas, the head of Ukraine’s SBU security service, Vasyl Hrytsak, said that the SBU already knew the results of the poll, BBC Kyiv correspondent Jonah Fisher tweeted on Nov. 9.
According to the SBU, the vote for the leader in the Russian-occupied part of Donetsk Oblast, Denis Pushilin, would be 55 percent, while the vote for his counterpart in Luhansk Oblast, Leonid Pasechnik, would be 63 percent. Turnout would be 70 percent, the SBU chief said.
Russia’s TV Rain channel, which is not controlled by the Kremlin, reported on Nov. 12 that the results of the poll were Pushilin – 60 percent and Pasechnik – 68.9 percent, with 96 percent of the votes counted. No figure for turnout was given.
There is no way to independently verify the reported results of the elections, and Ukraine has said it will not recognize them.
Hrytsak also said the SBU had a list of 6,538 people who were assisting in the holding of the vote in the Russian-occupied part of the Donbas. He said they could be liable to up to 15 years in prison for breaching Ukraine’s criminal code, the BBC’s Fisher reported on Twitter.
Pushilin, who was made head of the Russian-controlled part of Donetsk Oblast on Sept. 7 after the previous leader Oleksandr Zakharchenko was assassinated by a bomb in a restaurant, is a former worker for the MMM pyramid scheme, which bilked Russians out of millions of dollars in the early 1990s.
Pasechnik, who assumed control of the Russian-controlled part of Luhansk Oblast after the former leader, Ihor Plotnitsky, was toppled and fled the area after a power struggle in November 2017, is a former SBU officer who switched to collaborating with Moscow after Russia’s military intervention in the Donbas in 2014.
