Speaking to the press today, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko angrily condemned an announcement out of the breakaway east to hold “fake illegal elections,” which he insisted threatened to start a new round of wars against their territory, and justified a dramatic widening of sanctions.
The new sanctions will hit over 400 people and 90 different companies. Many of the companies targeted are Russian, and seemingly targeted just for the sake of going after high profile Russian companies, though Ukraine’s collapsing economy and hostility toward Russia as a matter of course means that many of the companies targeted will not experience any real impact by the move.
Among the people targeted, however, include a large number of foreign reporters, including many from around Western Europe, who will subsequently be banned from the country for providing coverage which the government considers unfavorable. Though Russian reporters banned by this measure will likely ignore it since they’re going into the rebel-held east anyhow, the BBC and Germany’s Die Zeit will be losing their on the ground reporters from the move.
The election issue centers on the Minsk ceasefire plan to hold local elections in the east in concert with the rest of the country in late October. Poroshenko’s government announced that there would be no elections in the east despite this agreement, and when the rebels announced that they intend to hold the local elections anyhow, with or without Poroshenko’s permission, he’s declaring it a “violation” of the deal.
Actually it could be argued that the election that brought Poroshenko to power was in fact a fake election as it failed to allow the Eastern Oblasts to vote! What is definite is that there wouldn't have been much of a problem if the Kiev Coup leaders had not have threatened to get rid of the Russian Speaking Sub Human scum that live in the eastern Ukraine! Oh those Neo Nazis, of course NOW Poroshenko is having a problem with them as well!
No, it could not be so argued. It was Putin's mercenaries who prevented people is the "Sausage" from voting, not the Ukrainian authorities. The bit about Russian speakers is, of course nonsense but it reveals one of the basic flaws in Putin's scam, namely, the assimilation of Russian speakers to Russians. I am Irish. I'm a native speaker of English. But I'm not English and I'm certainly not "pro-English" nor do I recognise the right of the British government ot "protect" me from my own country's government. Who gave Putin the right to deny the elementary human right of Russian-speaking ethnic Ukrainians to speak Russian while still remaining Ukrainians? Of course, Putin has to invent that scam because the only part of Ukraine where ethnic Russians are in the majority is Crimea and the fact that he resorts to such a scam shows that he is just inventing a pretext to allow him to exhume the Soviet Union in the form of an oligarch-run gangster state.
You've conflated language with ethnicity.
Poreshenko is likely panicked by the reality that an autonomous east does not fit the plans of his ultra right masterst. The first move by the neo-nazi militias may be on Kiev and Poreshenko himself.
With Putin getting ever more deeply stuck in the Syrian quagmire, the Ukrainians see no reason to make concessions. As in every other country in the world, any election held in Ukrainian sovereign territory other than in accordance with the constitution and laws of Ukraine is illegal. And if Putin's people are conducting elections at a different time from the rest of Ukraine, it indicates that they have no intention whatsoever of settling the dispute by compromise. Once again, the Ukrainians have wrongfooted Putin nicely.
Oh the irony.
Poroshenko become more and more ridiculous.Separatist regions are more ukrainian than Kiev guys.Poroshenko will enter in history as a murderer like his friend Yatseniuk.
The proposed eastern elections are not in accordance with Ukrainian law. The law bans Communist, Party of Regions and other non-patriotic parties from proposing candidates for election.