Gunmen seize control of district election offices in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, steal ballots and documents

The gunmen seized 11 district
elections offices and are threatening to capture at least eight more, news website Ukrainska Pravda
and News
Channel 24 reported, citing election officials. In most cases, the gunmen confiscated
election documents, including ballots, from the offices.

The building seizures and
document thefts come just five days before presidential elections are to be held
across Ukraine. Voters will cast their ballots for a new head of state on May
25, three months after former President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country and
was deposed by parliament for being unable to carry out his duties. A warrant
was later issued for the arrest of Yanukovych, who has been hiding out in
Russia. He is accused of ordering the mass murder of more than 100 EuroMaidan activists
during mass demonstrations in January and February.

In one incident at 11:30 a.m. on May 20, around
10 masked gunmen raided the city administration building in Artemivsk, a typically
quiet city of some 80,000 people 86 kilometers north of Donetsk. They
forced election officials there at gunpoint to hand over ballots, voter
lists and other documents, an election official present told the Kyiv Post by phone minutes
afterward.

The election official, who
asked that his name not be published for fear of reprisals by the gunmen, said his
office and the offices of his colleagues inside the city building on central
Artema Street were stormed and that the gunmen forced them to march the boxes
of documents outside to waiting vehicles.

The event lasted mere minutes,
but terrified the elections staff, the official said. “We are all very, very
scared. People are still standing here and we don’t know what to do,” he said
20 minutes after the incident.

The official couldn’t say
whether elections preparations would continue or if polling stations would be open
in Artemivsk on May 25. Also on May 20, the director of an Artemivsk school
where a polling station is usually set up during elections was threatened,
online Donetsk news site Ostrov
reported.

According to Ostrov, unknown masked
men told school representatives that “if you will have elections here we will
burn you and hang the director.” The news site did not identify which school
received the threat.

Gunmen also stormed several other
district elections offices in cities across Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts on May
20, in what appears to be an attempt to systematically shut down elections commissions
in the eastern regions ahead of this weekend’s vote.

Separatist leaders from the
self-declared people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk have said they will not
allow presidential elections to be held in the regions, which they say are now independent
states following referendums on secession held on May 11.

The Kyiv government and the
West have decried the referendums as illegitimate, while Moscow said it
respected the votes. Ukrainian authorities have since officially deemed the
separatists to be “terrorists.”

Armed men seized the elections
office of the 59th Congressional District in the center of Mariupol on May 20, Central
Elections Commission spokesperson Konstantin Hivrenko told Ukrainska Pravda. During the raid just after 11
a.m., “one of the members of the commission suffered injuries,” Hivrenko reportedly
said.

Several other elections
offices were seized or are under threat of being seized by masked gunmen in Donetsk, Kramatorsk, Horlivka, Yenakiieve, Torez, Luhansk, Krasnodon, Stakhanov, Alchevsk, Sverdlovsk, Starobysheve and Krasnyy Luch, as well as other nearby cities, according to elections officials.

Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller can be reached at miller@kyivpost.com and on Twitter at @ChristopherJM.