Elections did not take place in the regions of Ukraine controlled by separatists.
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The elections were seen as important in the light of the ongoing decentralization reform, under which local authorities will be granted more economic, administrative and financial powers.
The results of October 25 local elections in Ukraine indicate that Russian Federation has failed to create its fifth column in Ukraine, Pres Poroshenko said October 26.
While final first round election results are not expected to be released until next week, exit polls indicated that the results were largely split between the Ukrainian-speaking west and Russian-speaking east.
Meanwhile, Ukrainians are voting Sunday in elections for local councils, chairmen of rural councils, and city and town mayors. Poroshenko, a billionaire confectionery magnate, and prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk headed a self-described “kamikaze government” that promised to carry out extensive reforms at a breakneck pace.
“The elections indicated how far Ukraine still has to go, and how many legacies of the old regime need to be routed”, Joerg Forbrig, senior program director at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S.in Berlin, said by e-mail.
“The disposition of forces shows that the country is divided”, political analyst Vladimir Fesenko said. Voters will cast their vote for a particular party and its candidate in their electoral district. The reason: the majority of elections commission’s members refused to accept the ballots because of mistakes in a few of them.
“We also hope the citizens living in the conflict zone, internally displaced persons, and refugees will soon have the opportunity to exercise their right to choose their leaders, in compliance with Ukrainian law, OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) standards and as called for in the Minsk agreements”, Kirby said.
What is already known, according to the AP, is that in the capital Kiev and several other big cities, none of the mayoral candidates achieved the minimum number of votes needed to win, so there will be runoff elections on November 15.
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In Dnipropetrovsk, another major industrial city, the competition for mayor heated up between a candidate backed by supporters of the ousted president and one backed by local tycoon Ihor Kolomoysky, a contentious figure who has funded battalions of fighters against the separatist rebels. It was not immediately clear who would face him in the second round.
