Former electrician wins Ukraine rebel vote
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PRO-RUSSIAN rebels in Ukraine named a leader of their breakaway republic yesterday after a weekend election which was denounced by Kiev and the West and further deepened a standoff with Russia over the future of the former Soviet state.
Organizers of the vote said that Alexander Zakharchenko, a 38-year-old former mining electrician, had easily won election as head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, an entity proclaimed by armed rebels in the days after they seized key buildings in cities of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east last April.
The vote could create a new “frozen conflict” in post-Soviet Europe and further threaten the territorial unity of Ukraine, which lost control of its Crimean peninsula in March when it was annexed by Russia. Kiev and the West will now be looking to see if Russian President Vladimir Putin will formally recognize the validity of the vote.
A Russian deputy foreign minister made no mention of formal recognition but said the newly elected leadership in eastern Ukraine had been given a mandate to negotiate with Kiev.
Up to now, Kiev’s leaders have refused to hold direct talks with the rebels.
If Moscow were to recognize the vote, it would narrow options too for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. He has ruled out trying to take back the region by force after big battlefield losses in August. But after a parliamentary election on October 26, he is now supported by a pro-Western power structure, determined to stop the break-up of Ukraine, and he could come under pressure to take a firmer line.
“The central election commission deems Alexander Zakharchenko to be the elected head of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” an election official, Roman Lyagin, told journalists in Donetsk, the separatists’ stronghold.
Numbers of ballots cast for him appeared to show he had won 79 percent of the vote. The vote was the latest twist in a geopolitical crisis that began with the popular overthrow of Ukraine’s Moscow-backed leader, Viktor Yanukovich in February.
Kiev and Western governments, including the United States, say the election violated a bedrock agreement reached on September 5 in the Belarussian capital, Minsk, which was also been signed by Russia. Kiev says this provided for elections to be held under Ukrainian law which would appoint purely local officials. The rebels’ vote to elect leaders and institutions in a breakaway territory violated the agreement, it says.
Zakharchenko, the current rebel prime minister whose campaign advertisements are plastered across Donetsk, was always certain to win the vote. He has compared the Donbass region’s coal deposits to the oil reserves in the United Arab Emirates and has promised pensioners a stipend that will allow them to go on safari in Australia.
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