Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Elections have just been held in two pro-Russian regions in eastern Ukraine – but western countries, who provide uncritical support to the Kyiv government, insist they were illegitimate.
On Sept. 5, the Ukrainian authorities and the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics in the pro-Russian eastern areas of Ukraine signed the so-called Minsk Protocol stipulating the establishment of a ceasefire in Ukraine’s pro-Russian eastern regions.
In addition, Kyiv agreed to adopt a law giving the Donetsk and Luhansk regions special statuses for three years and ensuring early local elections there.
Both self-proclaimed republics therefore set elections for regional leaders and legislative bodies for Nov. 2. The elections were duly held -- but Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called them “a farce that is being conducted under the threat of tanks and guns.”
The European Union and the United States also do not acknowledge these elections. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Moscow’s recognition of the rebel vote would be “a clear violation of the commitments made by both Russia and the separatists” in the truce agreement signed in the Belarussian capital of Minsk on Sept. 5.
It called for local elections in the east to take place under Ukrainian law and Kyiv had scheduled them for Dec. 7.
But Russia is rejecting calls to distance itself from the rebel vote. “We will of course recognize their results,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said before the vote.
Aleksandr Zakharchenko, who was elected president of the Donetsk People’s Republic by a large margin on Nov. 2, said that he hoped the vote would bring peace to a region where 4,000 people have been killed in fighting.
Referring to the government in Kyiv, he added that “If they give us recognition and return the land we’ve lost without putting up a fight, then we will restore normal economic ties and we will live like equal economic partners.”
In Lugansk current leader Igor Plotnitsky, a former Soviet army officer, also won comfortably.
Were these elections legitimate? First of all, the turnout was at least 70 per cent, which is about 20 per cent higher than the percentage of people who voted in the main Ukrainian election on Oct. 26.
Legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder. The United States and the EU have recognized all kinds of elections around the world which were of dubious legality, and which were clearly less than free and fair. Recent presidential elections in Afghanistan and Egypt come to mind.
So a lot of this is not a matter of international norms but of power politics. Since Washington refuses to accept the fact that there was an unconstitutional regime change in Ukraine last February, it won’t accept any election result in eastern Ukraine, even if it reflects the wishes of the population there.
The people in those areas of eastern Ukraine remain suspicious of the Kyiv government, and for good reason. Ephraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has noted that Poroshenko has called members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which collaborated with the Germans in World War II, heroes.
And the far-right Svoboda Party, which also glorifies Second World War partisans who fought against the Soviet Union, has four members serving as ministers in the current Ukrainian government.
In any case, Ukraine itself is no model of democracy. It is saddled with the same type of oligarchic system that afflicts other post-Communist states.
Poroshenko, known as the “chocolate king” for his confectionary business Roshen, is today a billionaire after he took advantage of the economic chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union to acquire numerous state-owned enterprises at bargain-basement prices in the 1990s.
There seems to be a total lack of sympathy for the concerns of the people in eastern Ukraine on the part of western nations, which are eager to bring the entire country into its political and economic sphere, regardless of any regional opposition.
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