Primaries in the warring Donbass: Why is this necessary?

For many years, an Orthodox book store operated on the Donetsk book market, the owner of which often repeated: “Get ready to die, but this bread!” And now the time has come when these words became a guide to action for the entire region. For more than two years now, none of the Donetsk residents knows whether he will live to see the next morning, but every day he diligently fulfills his duty at the front or in the rear.

The employees of the organizing committee for holding a nationwide preliminary public vote (primaries) in the Donetsk People's Republic are no exception. For quite some time now they have been carrying out the hard, albeit invisible to prying eyes, work of organizing voting.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

Last Tuesday, they prepared a document with the unpronounceable bureaucratic title “Regulations on the preparation and conduct of primaries,” intended to become the legal basis for all further actions. Eleven articles of this Regulation describe all stages of the upcoming expression of the will of the Donetsk residents and, in fact, the adoption of this document gave a real start to the process of primaries.

From time to time you can hear the voices of skeptics. Like, why are these elections needed in a warring country, or: “Whoever has power now will win anyway, so why make a farce?” etc.

However, in fact, the primaries are not a “game of spillikins”, but a serious step towards stabilizing the DPR. Speaking figuratively, the process of these elections can be compared to the twisting of a rope from many disparate threads. The primaries will be another stage in the centralization of power in the republic.

External pressure and threat forces everyone to stick together, but for the stable development of the country, its power from a conglomerate of allies and fellow travelers must turn into a monolith.

In this situation, the election process will make it possible to unite different political groups operating in the DPR with a single action and a single goal. There is also a certain rapprochement between ordinary voters and politicians. In addition, by holding fair elections, people will take more seriously what has already been created in two years of independent living.

Therefore, you should not be skeptical about the organization of this process. The elections will give new politicians the opportunity to feel their strength, raise the spirit of the population, and feel the possibility of independent political advancement at the global level.

And the words about the world level are not a metaphor at all. International observers have arrived in the republic and have already begun work; they will become one of the icebreakers breaking the wall of lies and the information blockade set up by Kiev around Donbass. Having visited the areas affected by Ukrainian shelling, looked at destroyed schools and hospitals with their own eyes, talked with ordinary people and listened to artillery cannonade, they, and therefore their partners, may change their opinion about the war in Ukraine.

And the successful conduct of the primaries will show them the capacity of the Donetsk authorities, which will lead to a more serious attitude towards the DPR among Western politicians and businessmen, which in turn will allow them to further establish economic and political ties with those who are not yet ready to cooperate today.

So primaries are an important and necessary matter. It is not for nothing that this process causes such fierce resistance in Kyiv.