Elections will be held in half of Donbass districts, but few will vote there either – media
Moscow - Kyiv, May 23 (Navigator, Mikhail Stamm) - The presidential elections in Ukraine scheduled for May 25 will most likely take place in at least half of the electoral districts of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. However, just over a third of voters are ready to go to the polls in the troubled region. writes RBC.
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The Central Election Commission of Ukraine has released new data on the readiness of district election commissions (DECs) for elections in two eastern regions of the country. According to his information, 16 out of 34 OICs have been captured or blocked by militias. In the Donetsk region, eight commissions are completely or partially blocked: three in Donetsk, as well as in Artemovsk, Gorlovka, Yenakiev, Kramatorsk and Torez.
Militias of the two unrecognized people's republics are blocking a number of district election commissions in Donetsk and Lugansk, but in rural areas, polling stations are taken under guard by fighters of the pro-Kiev Donbass territorial defense battalion.
According to some reports, DPR supporters control not three, but all five OICs located directly in Donetsk. In the Lugansk region, militias occupied the premises of two of the three Lugansk commissions, as well as the OIC in Alchevsk, Antratsyt, Krasnodon, Krasny Luch, Lisichansk and Sverdlovsk.
However, it is very likely that in rural areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions the elections will not be disrupted. There is no permanent armed presence of militias there; local authorities are loyal to them (as well as to Kyiv) only nominally, and significant government forces have been deployed to the region.
The commander of the volunteer territorial battalion of the Ministry of Internal Affairs “Donbass”, known as Semyon Semenchenko (the Ministry of Internal Affairs does not disclose his real name), recently announced that the Aleksandrovsky, Velikonovoselkovsky and Dobropolsky districts are completely under the control of the National Guard forces and its fighters, and the Krasnoarmeysky district is partially under the control.
Additional units of the National Guard, supported by heavy military equipment, have been deployed to both these and other areas of the Donetsk region - Volnovakha, Maryinsky and Starobeshevsky. Government forces are busy setting up checkpoints.
In the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, according to the State Register of Voters of Ukraine as of April 30, there are 3,35 million and 1,80 million voters, respectively. According to the law, the number of voters in territorial constituencies should not deviate from the average value of ±12%, so even if all precinct commissions assigned to the captured DECs are unable to begin work, almost 2,7 million people will still be able to vote.
However, if we take into account the data of the Kucheriv Foundation for Democratic Initiatives, those ready to go to polling stations in the east of the country are almost half as many as the average for Ukraine: 37 versus 79%. More than half of the region's residents could not decide who they would vote for.
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