Donbas elections should be in five years, local administrator says

Elections in the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk should be held no earlier than five years, Heorhiy Tuka, the head of the Luhansk regional military-civil administration of the Ukrainian government, said in an interview with segodnya.ua published on March 15. Up to 75% of the population of occupied Luhansk favors pro-Ukrainian policies but is afraid of expressing its sympathies under current conditions, he said. “I think that before holding elections, a time out is needed to return the populations of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions to a normal understanding of things,” he said. “Secondly, these regions need to be removed from under the uncontrollable administration of ‘the fathers of Donbas’.”

Appointing Donbas oligarchs Rinat Akhmetov and Yuriy Boyko to govern the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk doesn’t conform with the Minsk accords, which only call for local elections, said on March 15 Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the current leader of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic on its website. Instead, it was the self-declared republics that achieved the hopes of the Maidan of removing oligarchs from power, he said. In his turn, Luhansk People’s Republic leader Igor Plotnitskiy said he would arrest Boyko if he was appointed the head of the Luhansk occupied territories and arrived. Boyko was an accomplice to the “Kyiv torturers” who supported the Anti-Terrorist Operation and genocide of the local population, he said.

Zenon Zawada: Western leaders reportedly want Donbas local elections by June, yet even the president’s representatives (like Tuka) are saying that’s unrealistic. We have long agreed with that assessment and view the elections as having a more realistic chance if Akhmetov and Boyko take the reins in Donbas. Yet these latest statements from Zakharchenko and Plotnitskiy make it apparent that this proposal will be violently resisted, even if the Kremlin were to support it. So the Donbas situation doesn’t look to be resolved within the next few months, even if Moscow and Kyiv agree on Akhmetov and Boyko.