In a development that dismayed many reformists, last week’s local elections in Ukraine saw oligarch-backed candidates win the mayorships of most of Ukraine’s major cities, beating out the candidates allied with President Petro Poroshenko’s reformist bloc. The turnout was not as high as reformists would have liked, and anecdotal evidence seemed to suggest that voters were frustrated by a perceived lack of progress on various promised reform packages, and were worn down by the stalled conflict in the country’s east.The country’s prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is personally bearing a lot of the blame for unsatisfactory progress on the reforms. His …read more
Source: The American Interest