MARIUPOL, Ukraine -- In downtown Mariupol, a group of soldiers with AK’s hanging loosely across their chests guard the entrance to a seemingly inconsequential drab grey building. Several stand sternly clad in balaclavas, while others choose to relax and chew on sunflower seeds. They’ve been assigned to ensure that violence doesn’t break out around this now controversial building, owned by billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov.
Inside, several Metinvest employees, watched carefully by electoral observers, who are themselves watched by Metinvest owned cameras, are operating a printing press which will issue the entire batch of electoral ballots for the Oct. 25 elections. Many in the city are bewildered by what they are witnessing.
“I don’t trust them to print ballots here because this place is owned by Akhmetov,” says one observer from the Power of the People party. “He owns Metinvest, and members of Metinvest are running for office. Now we have Metinvest employees printing electoral ballots at a Metinvest-owned printing press. You can imagine how easy it would be to manipulate the process.”
Even the chairman of the Central Electoral Commission says that he has no idea how the decision to print ballots at Akhmetov’s printing press was passed.
However, others don’t see the problem as being directly tied to the printing press.
Konstantin Batozsky, an advisor to a former governor Donetsk governor Serhiy Taruta, says that the problem isn’t just that the ballots were printed at Akhmetov’s business.
“They had nowhere else to print them because the decision on where to print them was held up, but it goes much deeper than that,” he says. “The real problem is that there is a professional industry of vote manipulation in Ukraine. It has always been this way. If you stop one way, they will have another ready to go.”
For his part, former Metinvest director of personnel, Vadim Boychenko, who is now running for mayor as part of the Opposition Bloc, told the Kyiv Post that he sees nothing wrong with printing the ballots at a Metinvest-owned building.
At his well-equipped downtown office, he claims that, “it doesn’t matter where they were printed,” and goes onto say that “it was already proven that the printing process was fair,” referring to an earlier investigation.
Boychenko is running on a platform to eliminate corruption in the city, but his connections to Akhmetov put that in doubt.
“Akhmetov’s strategy is to bring his people to power in every city where he has his plants. He’s just repeating all the old tricks from the Party of Regions.” claims Batozsky, who says he knows Boychenko personally. “Once he has his people in all the key positions of power, he can do whatever he wants.”
Another candidate, Oleksandr Yaroshenko, who is running under Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party, says that “there are 20 different ways to manipulate the elections, and they know all of them.”
However, it might just be the aggressiveness of Boychenko’s campaign that gets him elected on Oct. 25.
One employee from the massive Azovstal steelworks plant who wished to remain anonymous told the Kyiv Post that the company radio station has been broadcasting ads for Boychenko all day everyday. He says Boychenko even paid the plant a visit to discuss his campaign ideas. “It was part of these educational events they hold for us to tell us to vote for.”
Batozsky alleges that the campaign that Boychenko is running is funded by Akhmetov, and is so thoroughly planned that it doesn’t matter who the candidate is.
“Akhmetov’s people actually offered the position to more senior directors at the steelworks first, but they didn’t want it, so they found Boychenko. He’s a young guy, looks good, and speaks well. He has to do whatever they tell him to do,” he says.
According to the Azovstal employee, most of his colleagues at the plant will vote for Boychenko because they don’t care about developing Mariupol, they just worry about getting paid for a day of work. He even claims that many of the plant workers are pro-Russian, and will potentially create problems if Boychenko isn’t elected, because they will see it as detrimental to their jobs.
Surprisingly, in speaking with students at Mariupol’s Pryazovskyi State Technical University, at least one was also openly supportive of the separatists.
“The Ukrainian politicians have destroyed this country, I think Russian politicians operate better,” says 17-year-old Olya. When she’s interrupted by a fellow student who tries to explain that she’s not actually supportive of the separatists, she stops him and says that in fact she is, and she’s not afraid to express her opinion anymore. Still, she’s not clear who she’ll vote for.
Others in her group are planning to vote for Grigory Shykula, who they believe will be beneficial for the young people of Mariupol. The majority believe that Metinvest and Akhmetov are a leech on Mariupol’s population, sucking away opportunities from every other area. Still, at least one is an enthusiastic supporter of Boychenko and Metinvest. “Boychenko is a cool guy,” she says in english, “and Metinvest does good things for Mariupol.”
Either way, the prevailing opinion among most here is that as far as elections go, falsified elections are guaranteed. As one student, 21-year-old Nikita says, “The decision on elections has already been made. Have the elections here ever not been corrupt?”
