Donbas terrorist leaders agree to postpone elections

The leaders of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics announced on Oct. 7 that they have agreed to postpone their local elections, originally scheduled for Oct. 18 and Nov. 1 respectively, until the next year, reported the RIA Novosti news agency. The elections may be held in February, reported Interfax, citing its sources among the Luhansk separatists, who demanded in return that the Ukrainian government fulfill all its obligations under the Minsk accords.

The Trilateral Contact Group to resolve the Donbas conflict discussed the new election law that will need to be approved by parliament in order to hold local elections in the occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

The new election law is needed to allow Donbas refugees to vote from remote locations, the participation of Ukrainian mass media and political parties, ensuring election commissions are formed with Kyiv’s approval, said Yuriy Lutsenko, the head of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc parliamentary faction. Moreover, Russian soldiers must be removed in time for the vote and the terrorists must lay down their arms, he said. Those terrorists confirmed to have engaged in killings and torture can’t participate, he said.

Zenon Zawada: The postponement of elections keeps the Minsk accords alive, which isn’t necessarily a positive thing. Not even half of Lutsenko’s laundry list of demands will be met by the Russian side. In making such a statement, he was adhering to Poroshenko’s tradition of sweet-sounding demands yet utterly opposite results. We don’t expect new elections, under Ukrainian law, will be held successfully because we don’t expect the Russian side to agree to basic conditions, such as removing its soldiers.

Instead, the debate over the elections – which have become the fulcrum in the success or failure of the Minsk accords – has the potential to divide Ukrainian society even further and cause more violent strife next year. We believe this has become part of Putin’s strategy in Ukraine, which is to use the fighting over the Minsk accords to cause enough division within Ukraine to cause society to implode from within. It just might work in this game of which regime/country collapses first. Yet if Poroshenko is able to hold things together, however loosely, it will be Putin’s regime that eventually buckles.