SLOVIANSK-SEMENIVKA-MYKOLAYIVKA, Ukraine – Brand new windows and doors and the smell of fresh paint greeted Semenivka voters on Oct. 26 at a polling station inside a local school. Occupied by Kremlin-backed separatist proxies in May, the school, like most buildings in this Donetsk Oblast village just outside the district center of Sloviansk, was heavily damaged when Ukrainian forces won back control of the area in July.
The newly-repaired corridors lined with Ukrainian flags,
photographs of President Petro Poroshenko and copies of the constitution, were
largely empty. Just 300 people – 25 percent of the registered electorate – had
turned out to vote in parliamentary elections by 3 p.m., and election
commission staff was not expecting many more.
“Lots of people have left the area,” said committee member
Irina Chala. “Many got Russian citizenship and left for good, others have
nowhere to live anymore because their houses were destroyed.”
When polls closed at 8 pm., some 31 percent of the 140,858
voters in the election district had cast their ballot, according to official
data. Associated with the former ruling Party of Regions, Opposition Bloc
candidate Yuri Solod was leading with 36.22 percent of the votes by 11:55 a.m.
on Oct. 27. He is married to fellow Opposition Bloc member Natalia Korolevska,
who served as the social policy minister under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
Semenivka and surrounding towns have been back in Ukrainian
hands since July, but the Oct. 26 vote showed the wounds both physical and mental
are far from healed. Although volunteers from all over Ukraine, funded by
sponsors including individuals running for election yesterday, are rebuilding
local schools and dwellings, hundreds of people are still facing winter without
doors and windows.
Another polling station in the district psychiatric hospital
in Semenivka was not open because the hospital is a bombed-out shell. Three
elderly ladies had ridden their ancient bicycles to the school from the other
end of the village in order to cast their ballot.
“Of course we voted,” they chorused.
“We voted for peace,
and a happier future for our children,” added one.
Those children were conspicuously absent in Semyonivka and
in neighboring Mykolaivka. Observers and election committee staff said voters
were almost entirely older people, with young men being particularly scarce. By
2pm in Mykolaivka, committee member Marina Matyashola said there had been
perhaps ten younger men in total at her polling station.
“Everyone’s at the war,” she said, adding that most were
fighting against Ukraine, in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic militia,
which the Ukrainian government considers a terrorist organization.
Matyashola would not say for whom she voted, but she was
clear about what she wants from the results. “We want peace,” she said, “so
that our husbands and sons can come back to us.”
Most people in Mykolaivka say they want peace. The town also
suffered heavily in July when Ukrainian forces took back the town. School No. 3,
acting as a polling station, has been repaired with support from Donbasenergo
and the ‘New Donbas’ foundation, but school director Olga Krasnopeya said that
a quarter of the 400 pupils have left. Opposite, broken glass still litters the
floors of the abandoned post office.
But opinion in Mykolaivka remains divided between those who
support Ukraine and those who still back the Donetsk People’s Republic. Many
did not vote because they were afraid in a town now held by Ukrainian forces,
or do not believe any Ukrainian government could improve their lives.
“People don’t believe that everything is going to be fine,
so they don’t come to vote,” said Tatiana Yurchenko, an election observer from
Mykolaivka.
For those people feeling let down by both the Ukrainian
government and the Donetsk People’s Republic, practical action on the ground proved the most
effective election campaign tactic. Yurchenko complained that several local
government commissions had come to examine the damage to her house but not one
had offered any help. She was representing candidate Solod, a Luhansk businessman
running in a single-mandate seat who she said she supported because he had
organized practical help both during and after the recent conflict, evacuating
people from danger zones and distributing humanitarian aid.
In Semenivka, election committee member Olga Bobritska had a
similar story: her house is being fixed with help from local candidate Iryna
Dovgan who organised both materials and volunteer builders.
“They put in new plastic windows, of course they didn’t
manage to finish the roof before the elections,’ said Bobritska. “I hope
they’ll continue with it afterwards.”
Dovgan, who ran a beauty salon in nearby Yasinuvata which is
in separatist hands, became famous in August when she was captured by the DNR,
tortured and publicly humiliated as a “spy” for her support of the Ukrainian
army. Dovgan went on to give a report to the United Nations and although
stating she was “not a politician,” decided to run for election in late
September.
Bobritska said she supported Dovgan not just for the
material aid she had provided.
“We have to vote for our own,” she said. “For me, she’s a
symbol of our Ukraine. She’s a person who will never surrender.”
People from Dovgan’s home town of Yasinuvata, and other
towns still under the control of the Donetsk People’s Republic or the neighboring Luhansk People’s
Republic, also a terrorist organization under Ukrainian legislation – over 2 million voters – could only vote if
they had registered as “re-settlers” in Ukraine-held territories. One such was
27-year-old Alyona from Donetsk, who has been living in Sloviansk for the last
two months but only registered last week so that she could vote.
Alyona, like other people from separatist-occupied
territories, did not want to give her last name because it could endanger her
parents, still in Donetsk. Her parents planned to travel to Sloviansk to vote
yesterday, but decided the trip was too dangerous. Routes out of the city
change daily due to shelling and migrating checkpoints where traffic has to
wait from five minutes to several hours and no one can predict the behavior of
the Moscow-backed militants.
“When my parents came last week to vote, they had to wait so
long at the check point back into Donetsk they were afraid they would never be
allowed back in,” said Alyona. One of their acquaintances, a local businessman
who made a similar trip, got home to Donetsk to find his house had been
searched by the DNR in his absence.
Alyona was one of the few younger people who voted, choosing
the Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front party. “Every person
should make a responsible choice and vote,” she said. “We’ve already paid too
high a price for people saying they aren’t responsible for what is happening in
Ukraine.”
Nevertheless, peace, which is what most in east Ukraine say
they want from the new parliament, remains literally a dream rather than a
political possibility. “I had a dream when I arrived in Sloviansk, that Donetsk
was freed in three days and I could go home,” Alyona said. “I live with that
dream, that maybe it’s true.”
