International monitors from the OSCE judged Ukraine’s local elections held this Sunday to be largely competitive, free and democratic. While this was true for most of the country, the vote was also a major setback for the Ukraine’s efforts to integrate the citizens of its Russian-speaking East.
Some 2 million Ukrainians from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions who live outside Russia-backed enclaves were denied the right to participate in Sunday’s elections.
Despite Ukraine’s Central Election Commission’s best efforts, local supervisory election bodies in Mariupol (population 450,000) and Krasnoarmiysk (population 68,000) canceled the vote. Not surprisingly, these local commissions appear to have been …read more
Source: European Voice
