Pro-Russian separatist Alexander Zakharchenko has easily won an election for leadership of a breakaway republic in eastern Ukraine, the vote’s organisers said on Monday.
Sunday’s vote, the climax of a six-month separatist rebellion in Ukraine’s industrialised east, took place in defiance of Kiev’s pro-Western authorities and was certain to worsen the standoff between Russia and the West over the future of the ex-Soviet republic.
“The central election commission deems Alexander Zakharchenko to be the elected head of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” an election official, Roman Lyagin, told journalists in Donetsk, the separatists’ political and military stronghold in eastern Ukraine.
Zakharchenko, 38, a mining electrician-turned-rebel leader, had received 765,340 votes, Lyagin said, which appeared to represent 79 percent of the vote.
Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Petro Poroshenko, denounced the vote on Sunday night as a “farce (conducted) under the barrels of tanks and machine guns”. He said it violated a Sept. 5 agreement reached in the Belarussian capital, Minsk, which had also been signed by Russia.