High hopes for Ukrainian vote despite turmoil

Ukraine votes for a new president tomorrow despite spiralling violence in the country’s east, where pro-Russian insurgents have promised to do everything to prevent the election.

Western governments say they hope the election will help to stabilise the country of 45mn and to defuse the worst conflict with Russia since the end of the Cold War.

But the ongoing bloodshed in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions promises to make the task for the next Ukrainian president a gargantuan one.

The front-runner in the polls, billionaire businessman and prominent MP Petro Poroshenko, has promised to bring Ukraine closer to the European Union while at the same time re-establishing good relations with Russia.

Moscow, which rejects the current Ukrainian government’s legitimacy, has cautiously endorsed the vote, with officials arguing that while it will not be fully legitimate it was better to let the election go ahead than cancel it.

But the pro-Russian insurgents, which control large areas of the country’s eastern industrial heartland, say the election is an illegal provocation during a time when government forces are attacking their positions with guns and armoured vehicles.

They have kidnapped election workers and destroyed computers and voting lists, leaving those willing to carry out the vote intimidated.

None of the candidates openly supports the separatists, and campaigning has been practically impossible in the regions hit by the insurgency.

The government in Kiev vows that the vote will go ahead in all parts of the country, including not only Donetsk and Luhansk but Crimea, which was annexed by Russia after a controversial referendum in March.

Critics maintain that most of the 7mn voters in those areas will not take part, raising doubts that the winner can legitimately claim to be president of all of Ukraine.

Parliamentary speaker Oleksandr Turchynov, who has served as Ukraine’s interim president since the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych in February, yesterday called upon Ukrainians to participate in the vote.

Tomorrow’s vote is the most crucial since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, with the country facing the threat of partition and teetering on the brink of economic collapse.  

The US and its European allies have threatened more sanctions if Moscow disrupts the vote, adding to a series of punitive measures imposed after Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in March.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin has brushed off the threats, saying the sanctions will “boomerang” on the West. He accuses Washington of choreographing the ouster of Yanukovych who fled in the bloody climax of months of protests sparked by his decision to scrap a pact forging closer ties with Europe.

Both the West and Russia should not let the situation get out of hands: they must know a new Cold War will benefit nobody.