Eighteenth may, Deputy Prime Minister for reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories Alexey Reznikov said that Ukraine should strive to hold local elections in the autumn of 2020 across the country, including the temporarily occupied regions of Donetsk and Lugansk regions. The same argument is the fifth of may in live online discussion, which involved representatives of the American analytical center “Atlantic Council”, said the head of the office of the President Andriy Yermak.
This idea, which is in the form of “elections in Donbass” announced the Russians in 2014-m to year, contains a number of fraud and threats to national security of Ukraine. Why in 2020 you can not hold “elections” in the occupied territories, and what the potential consequences are possible if they are held?
What war?
Is it possible to end the war by election? The debate on elections as a way to solve a war is also a war: what is its concept, so the architecture of the world. What a picture she paints? As if there are two equal sides that need to agree with each other. For the election of the second party needs elections.
Democracy is supposed to bring legitimacy and peace. And Russia here — only the intermediary: we do not offer to hold elections in Rostov-na-Donu or to nominate candidates from the “United Russia”? It is transformation “of a Russian attack on Ukraine” to Putin’s concept of “the civil war in Ukraine”, which they successfully sell the world press, international organizations and States which will not be particularly go into details.
But the real reasons for the war is the desire of Ukraine to join the EU and NATO as well as Russia’s violation of the Budapest Memorandum that destroys the world order of the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and the Russian-Ukrainian intergovernmental agreement. What’s the local elections in the occupied Debaltsevo, Alchevsk or Gorlovka? Worst of all, under the “election on the entire territory of Ukraine” refers to the Crimea. Thus, the office of the President de facto consents to the annexation. Otherwise, where the plan of holding elections in the Ukrainian Crimea?
Unselected, danger, injustice
What is an election? The arrival of more than 50% of the population to the polling station? The process of lowering the ballot in the box? The counting of votes and announcement of results? It usually looked like “elections” in the Soviet Union. Uncontested candidate usually got more than 90% of the vote. Just look at the phony “referendum” in Crimea and Donetsk-Luhansk in 2014, and any subsequent occupant simulation.
The root of the word “election” in the selection. There are a couple of conditions. First — security. Is it possible, for example, in Donetsk to publicly speak Ukrainian or walk down the street with a blue-yellow flag, without paying for this torture in a concentration camp “Isolation”?
The second is the capacity to be elected. Will I be able to run for the position of mayor of Lugansk, the representative of “European solidarity”? Whether conventional Petro Poroshenko and Andriy paruby to come to support the candidate from their party without risking their lives?
Third — the opportunity to vote for about one and a half million refugees, many of whom publicly spoke out against the invaders. Many of them will want to get a chance to get “in the basement” just in order to go to vote?
Unarmed, few in number and were forced to “neutral” the OSCE mission is not able to guarantee basic safety even to himself, not to mention free elections, border control or disarmament of illegal armed Russian units. The UN peacekeeping mission is not ready, even in theory, not to mention the decision-making, procurement, financing would be impossible until the fall of 2020.
In ORDA destroyed law enforcement and judicial system — so there is no one to guard the elections and ensure their fairness (for example, to challenge the results would be impossible).
Would such “elections” responsible for crime under the guise of “Russian spring”, for the mass torture and murder? Or are they specially designed as an Amnesty for these murderers and rapists, as if specially selected Russian curators on the role of “representatives of the people of Donbass”? If it is possible with impunity, then why not do it again?
Propaganda, the Holocaust and the dignity
For choice citizens need information. Ukrainian media in the occupied territories is not available, and controlled by the occupiers and the official Russian media for the sixth year purposefully form thinking. People living in ORDO, are subjected to an incredible stream of propaganda — from “crucified boys” and “punitive” to the historical distortions of the “great Patriotic war”.
To hold elections in such conditions — just lock imposed on the occupier reality. What is this choice?
ORDO — area humanitarian, environmental and economic disaster. Most economically active and skilled population has left, dozens of businesses stolen and exported to the territory of Russia, and the rest cut for scrap.
Mine water and toxic tailings (a complex of installations and equipment, intended for the storage or disposal of radioactive, toxic and other non-utilizable wastes of minerals enrichment — approx. transl.) can turn the land into a desert. Not the best as alcoholism, drug addiction, tuberculosis, and AIDS still increases coronavirus pandemic, which can not handle the local destruction of medicine.
We are waiting for the catastrophe of the African or Asian scale, infections, pollution of rivers and mass migrations. How all this can solve the “elections in Donbass”? The psychological state of the population, which is in its sixth year living in the conditions of the curfew, depressed. Dissent is deadly: people are afraid to think.
No long time on the way out of this crisis, the impossible choice: will you choose fear, injury and inertia. Or this choice wants them Zelensky?
Conclusion
Propaganda mantra about “the world” of the current Ukrainian authorities should not replace national security. Local elections in the fall of 2020 in the occupied ORDO can have consequences commensurate with the Nazis instigated a referendum in the Sudeten land in Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Foreign intermediaries in Minsk in the Normandy format should also remember the lessons of Munich 1938. Imitation of the peace process through local democracy in the context of the Russian hybrid war will not lead to peace. At best it will delay the time and suffering of people under occupation, in the worst — dismantle the constitutional order of Ukraine and undermine our will to fight.
Any real elections in ORDA possible only after de-occupation and reintegration, not “the day before the resumption of the Ukrainian or international control of the border”. All the rest is Russian scenario for the legalization of its agents, the future of the game in the “civil war” and the prelude to a far greater casualties and suffering.
