Defying peace agreements reached in the Minsk, Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine started on Oct. 2 holding“primaries” for local elections in the areas where they have seized control from the Ukrainian government.
A final vote for seats on local councils in the areas of Donbas controlled by the separatists is scheduled for Nov. 6.
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Kyiv views the elections as illegal, as the Ukrainian parliament has yet to adopt separate legislation for them, as required under the Minsk peace agreement.
Ukraine has consistently resisted attempts by Russia to short-circuit the Minsk agreements by holding local elections in the occupied territories – a step towards reintegrating them with the rest of Ukraine – before it has removed its servicemen and weapons from eastern Ukraine.
Russia denies sending weapons and soldiers into eastern Ukraine to foment a conflict and support the separatists, but there is now ample evidence that these denials are false, and that the “uprising” in eastern Ukraine was largely directed by the Kremlin.
The leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Oleksandr Zakharchenko, was quoted as saying that the preliminary elections were necessary “on the one hand, to solve our own problems in building a state system, on the other hand, to show that the claims made by Ukrainian side are not significant.”
But Olga Ayvazovska, one of Ukrainian representatives in the political subgroup of the Minsk Trilateral contact group, which is made up of representatives of Ukraine, Russian and the OSCE and was established to negotiate a peace plan for eastern Ukraine, said she believes that Ukraine should condemn the so-called “primaries.”
She said holding the preliminary vote in the local elections was an attempt by the Kremlin-controlled separatists to legitimize the process of the so-called “elections.”
Ayvazovska said that the voting on the territories controlled by pro-Russian militants was likely to be rigged to show local people’s support for a majority election system, in which candidates run for local or national parliaments in single-mandate districts, as opposed to a proportional system in which parties compete to pass a certain threshold to be represented in a legislature.
She said this was being done to exclude Ukrainian parties from the electoral process, and would block negotiations in Minsk on organizing legitimate elections in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine will never agree to a majoritarian voting system elections in the occupied territories, she said.
The so-called “primaries” will be held in nine districts of Donetsk, in the town of Mospyne and in the villages of Staromykhaylivka, Oleksandrivka, Laryne. They will also be held in the cities of Luhansk and Oleksandrivsk, and in the village of Yuvileyny.
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