Greetings from Novorossiya: Eyewitness to the War in Ukraine

5. KIEV IS POWERLESS

MAY 11, 2014. Some residents of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions decided to participate in the referendum. Its purpose is to “officially” bring into being two parastates: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Everything seems quiet and the voting is not interrupted by any incidents. However, when you go to the State Regional Administration occupied by the separatists and the Central Electoral Commission that they have established, you will understand that this peace is not completely spontaneous. Order is maintained by armed men, who seem to have multiplied since March. They don’t tolerate any opposition. Therefore, those who don’t vote stay at home or pack their bags to move to a more peaceful location.

“You must have a lot of confidence to defend the Ukrainian state,” a lady journalist tells me. She is right. Although separatists were in the minority, nobody stands in their way. It is probable that no one would have interfered with the referendum, even if its champions had not been armed. Since the fall of the Yanukovych regime, the Ukrainian state has not existed in Donbas.

People are queuing up in front of the very few polling stations. These are Donetsk residents who want to take part in the referendum. What will happen next?

“I don’t know,” replies almost every single person I ask. For many of them it is simply an opportunity to express their disagreement with Kiev’s politics, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they want their regions to separate from Ukraine. They often talk about federalization, but in fact they would be happy with simple decentralization. They claim they want a stronger say in electing the authorities and that the referendum is a means to achieve this. And what about Russia?

“Those who want to join Russia must have been paid off,” says seventy-five-year-old Natalya on her way to the polling station to vote for the independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Among the people who have already voted or are about to do so, there are some who believe that their choice is a step toward Russia. I hear this from quite a few Donetsk residents.

Up to the beginning of May it was not obvious if the referendum would take place at the appointed time. Its fate was uncertain until the very end, although it had been planned at the beginning of the pro-Russian events in Donbas. Even in mid-April the Communist Anatoly Khmelovy from Slovyansk maintained that there would be only one question: about federalization. Then it was said that the referendum would be about regional independence. At another point I heard there would be three questions: about independence, about joining Russia, and about remaining in Ukraine. In Donetsk there were rumors about two referenda. The former was to be about independence, the latter about joining Russia. In the end this project was abandoned.

“Here everybody wants to be part of Russia. This is one of the main slogans raised during the marches,” explains Myroslav Rudenko a few days after the referendum. He represents the self-proclaimed authorities and walks around in a T-shirt with the image of the “people’s governor” Pavel Gubarev on it. It’s true that you could hear this expression quite often during the demonstrations. But only a marginal group among the Donbas residents participated in the protests. After talking to them for a moment I realized that only a few of them actually wanted to become Russian citizens. Yet to the unrecognized authorities this is irrelevant, as is the Kremlin’s lack of full enthusiasm for incorporating Novorossiya into the Russian Federation.

The separatists instantly rejected Kiev’s proposal to organize an all-Ukrainian referendum on federalization. (According to Ukrainian law, a referendum can only be held on a nationwide basis.) In the beginning of April the Ukrainian Center for Public Opinion Research (Rejtinh) conducted a survey in which Ukrainian citizens (including residents of Crimea) were asked what kind of state Ukraine should be. The results: 64 percent of respondents opted for a unitary state, 14 percent supported federalization, 10 percent wanted a unitary state but without Crimea, and only 1 percent wished for Ukraine to break up into several states. In Eastern Ukraine the results were, respectively, 45 percent, 26 percent, 8 percent, and 4 percent. The research sample consisted of twelve hundred people. Later research can’t be treated seriously because the territories controlled by separatists were not included.

When at seven in the morning I walk to the polling station to watch the referendum, streets in Donetsk are almost empty, as they usually are on a Sunday. Apart from occasional trolleybuses moving at a snail’s pace, I don’t see any vehicles or people. The sun is rising slowly, heralding a pleasant day. When I arrive at the location it is a quarter to eight. All stations will open in fifteen minutes. This one, like many others, is situated in a primary school. People are gathering. Right now, there are twenty, but newcomers keep arriving.

Olha is among them. She is a doctor, about forty. “I couldn’t sleep. I was so eager for this vote,” she explains, excited. She claims that all her relatives and friends will take part in the referendum. Why? “Nobody wants to live with fascists.” That’s how she describes the advocates of a united Ukraine.

This opinion is shared by Valentina, Olha’s neighbor, who is a little older. She can’t say that her entire family is going to vote. Valentina’s relatives don’t live in Donetsk but in Kiev, and what is worse, they support the “fascists.”

“I don’t want to know them anymore, I have broken all contact,” she says frankly. Valentina’s behavior is not unusual. No Ukrainian conflict has ever shaken society as this one has. Many people like Valentina declare they will never speak with their relatives again because there is nothing to talk about. The proponents of a united Ukraine act in a similar manner. They don’t want to deal with those who take the Russian side. The champions of the Donetsk People’s Republic are nicknamed “the zombified,” which means made totally stupid by Russian propaganda. There are instances in which after a few months of silence somebody’s uncle or aunt calls from Crimea, Rostov, or the vicinity of Moscow. They have simply packed up and left, without notifying anybody. They believe that in Russia and in occupied Crimea war will not happen.

At eight o’clock the station is still closed because two thousand ballots are not there yet. “They are coming,” explains Larisa, a member of the polling commission. She assures me that there is nothing to worry about because the commission is very experienced. Its members have been participating in elections organized by the Ukrainian state for many years. In fact, at first glance everything looks as if official elections are taking place, except for the missing ballots and the lack of Ukrainian state symbols in the polling station. When the delayed ballots finally arrive, the commission members start counting them immediately. They do it very quickly and the voting may begin.

Two see-through ballot boxes stand in the middle of the room. Such are always used in Ukraine to make elections more transparent. Because of this, however, people are under more pressure since it is very easy to see if a voter made the “correct” choice. The official forms for authenticating the vote—the protocols—have been dropped in the ballot boxes, then the boxes have been secured. On the right side there are voting booths where you can tranquilly answer a rather awkwardly phrased question: “Do you support the independence act of the Donetsk People’s Republic?” The commission’s tables are behind the booths. There you can find your address and get a ballot.

A few minutes after eight voting is finally possible. Fifty people, more or less, instantly come inside. They are of different ages, but elderly people predominate. The first ballots are dropping into the box.

“For, for, for, for,” I mumble. “Oh, there is one against.” I show it to a lady journalist standing next to me. In the polling stations that I visit the majority of voters have supported the independence of the Donetsk region.

In the afternoon crowds of people go out into the Donetsk streets. Most of them take advantage of the day off to have a walk with their family or to meet friends. Social life is blooming on Pushkin Boulevard in the city center. Waiters can’t complain about being bored. Families with children walk along the boulevard.

You can easily spot people who are not going to vote. “It’s a farce,” they sum things up. Nonetheless, they don’t want to talk to the media and they speak in low voices. This is not surprising. In May many pro-Ukrainian activists left the city because they feared for their lives. Their personal information was widely “distributed.” There were always people willing to denounce a “fascist.”

The indifferent majority of people want to live their lives and try not to pay any attention to what is happening all around them. Perhaps they are scared because not so long ago thousands of people with Ukrainian flags would take to the streets, shouting “Glory to Donbas, glory to the miners,” and now they are not there anymore. Demonstrators abandoned by Kiev and intimidated by the “people’s republics” keep to themselves at home or leave the city. The only Ukrainian politician I have met here is Oleh Lyashko, a populist from the Radical Party.

Oleksandr, a twenty-something casually strolling down Pushkin Boulevard, has not left yet. You can see from a distance that he doesn’t fit here. The referendum is not his thing.

“I am not taking part in this. It is a fraud,” he says loudly, although the polling commission is just some fifty meters away and the advocates of separatism are wandering around. “I want to live in a united Ukraine. If Donbas declares its independence, most likely I will move to the central or western part of the country,” he adds with self-confidence. For now, Donetsk means Ukraine, and Oleksandr, who graduated from college, has a job and is not leaving.

We didn’t have to wait too long for the ballots to arrive at the station, simply because they are reproduced, without any supervision, by the copying machines located in the Central Election Commission. In principle, all voters could come with their own ballots that had been printed out at home. The ballot template had been circulating on the internet for a while. The complete voting lists are missing, too. You can just bring your passport with a stamp proving that you reside in the Donetsk region and you can vote.

“There are many people who can’t vote in their own places or who work in Donetsk, so we have offered them this opportunity,” explains Larisa from the polling commission. Everything would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that those people can vote in every polling station, because nobody can possibly check if a particular voter hasn’t already voted somewhere else. With some ingenuity, even someone officially registered as living in Donetsk will be able to vote in several places without a problem.

Roman Lagin, the president of the Central Election Commission of the Donetsk Republic, claims that in Donetsk proper there are 118 polling stations and in the entire region there are 1,527. But it looks as if these numbers are made up. A day before the referendum I asked the separatists’ representatives if a list of the polling stations existed. They answered that it didn’t. Until the very end, as well, nobody knew the locations of the polling stations. Some Donetsk residents were completely lost. They would come to where voting used to take place in the past, but the polling stations were not there anymore.

“Where is a polling station?” a forty-something Donetsk resident is asking loudly. The passersby are trying to help him, but it turns out that they themselves don’t know where to vote either.

Thanks to the limited number of polling stations it was easier to create the impression of crowds rushing en masse to vote. Many journalists attended only the opening of the polling places. The most committed groups of voters were already waiting there. These were the avid champions of the Donetsk People’s Republic. The polling stations were open from eight in the morning to eleven at night. Later in the day the turnout was smaller. The ballot boxes were half filled, or even less.

“Seventy percent of the people have already voted here,” a member of one commission tries to convince me at five in the afternoon. The number of ballots in the boxes proves otherwise. In each station I hear stories about the successful turnout.

I ask Larisa from the polling commission if I can stay when the votes are counted. “Nobody can stay, not even observers, just the members of the commission,” she states with great satisfaction. According to her, this indicates that if the commission is left alone with the ballot boxes, the elections are honest. She has managed to throw me off guard, so I don’t ask another question.

Even Russia hasn’t sent any observers to the referendum. Voting in Donbas is monitored only by the supporters of the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The results are announced already, two or three hours after the referendum is over. They are presented during a press conference where Russian media and the media created by the separatists are especially well represented. According to Roman Lagin, the president of the Central Election Committee, 89.07 percent of the voters have supported the independence of the Donetsk region. The turnout was 74.87 percent. The highest turnout was in Horlivka and reached 96 percent. It is unclear, however, how they estimated the turnout so quickly if complete lists of voters didn’t exist. In the Luhansk region the separatists won even greater support. The people’s republic was favored there by 96 percent of the voters with a turnout of 75 percent.

The referendum took place without any serious incidents. Only in Krasnoarmijsk, located near the border with the Dnipropetrovsk region, did a curious event occur. Some armed pro-Ukrainian militants showed up and tried to stop people from voting. A group of outraged voters gathered quickly in front of the polling place.

“You have broken the referendum!” they shouted. When shoving started, one of the militants shot into the ground a few times. Ricocheting bullets killed one man and wounded another in the leg. The insurgents, disconcerted by the incident, left the city. It was clear they had planned to stay there much longer, because before the shooting they had taken over a police station to turn it into sleeping accommodations.

Yuriy, a local police chief, is well experienced in contacts with assorted militants. Since the beginning of the Russian Spring his police station has been captured three times. This time, however, it was not done by separatists. He claims that their cars had Kiev or Dnipropetrovsk license plates.

“We no longer have vests, helmets, and weapons. They were taken by the men who broke into the station first. Now, when the pro-Ukrainians showed up I could just spread my arms helplessly and tell them that I have only my shirt left,” he says. Because of this incident the referendum ended earlier, but still the local commission claimed a turnout of 70 percent, so its results were absolutely legal.

Except for this unclear incident that probably was the arbitrary action of some pro-Ukrainian group, Kiev took no measures to stop the “referendum.”

The separatists can now proclaim a huge success—Kiev has lost, at least for the time being. Everyone still remembers the “Crimean referendum” that was the last step before annexation by Russia. That’s how it is perceived by the most enthusiastic proponents of the Donetsk People’s Republic, who don’t seem to notice any difference in the questions posed. In Crimea people were asked about joining Russia, in Donbas they were asked about independence or autonomy (the Russian word can be interpreted in many ways). The Kremlin is more reserved in talking about the future of Donbas than it was in case of Crimea. It respects the results of the so-called referendum, but at the same time it doesn’t encourage breaking relations with Kiev. Instead, it pushes for dialogue.

In Donetsk the separatists’ success is hard to notice. The indifferent still live their lives and don’t pay any attention to what’s happening around them. The cautious decided it would only get worse later, so they packed up and left. Along with them many people with pro-Ukrainian views who had doubts until the very end said good-bye to Donetsk. The referendum was the symbolic end of opposition to the separatists. From now on nobody will dare challenge them.

The day after the referendum the separatist authorities decided to celebrate independence. In the evening a round of fireworks was fired from the administration building. The cannonade lasted a few minutes. A tiny group of spectators stood in front of the building. The indifferent ignored it. Creation of the “republic” didn’t take them away from their dinner plates and private discussions in the local bars. They still hoped they would live as before.

On May 25, two weeks after the referendum, Ukrainians were about to elect a new president. It was the number one topic in the entire country (except for the occupied territories). It was stressed that the election results would determine the future or even the existence of the state. Many Ukrainians decided to vote for Petro Poroshenko, although he was not their dream candidate. Yet they wanted to elect him in the first round to legitimize the authorities fighting the separatists and to continue the reforms. But it looked as if nobody cared whether in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions these elections would take place.

A few days after the referendum I go to one of the polling stations that is getting ready for the Ukrainian presidential elections. It looks like a meeting of an underground organization.

“Are you looking for the commission? You have to go this way,” a lady janitor tells me. Only one door is open in the empty building. The members of the commission have gathered there. The most important part of their session is excluding those members who don’t want to hold any formal position or who want to sabotage the commission’s activity. In this case it is a woman sent by the Communists. The Communist Party has declared that its members will not participate in the elections. The Communist representative has stopped attending the meetings, but she has no intention of leaving the commission. If other commission members followed suit, its activity could be blocked for its lack of a quorum.

The commission makes its decision to exclude the Communist. The two OSCE observers are staring at their smartphones. Noticing their lack of interest, the interpreter doesn’t even try to tell them what is happening. They sit there in silence minding their own business.

Will the elections take place?

“If Kiev doesn’t help us, I don’t think so,” says Volodymyr, one of the commission members. He explains that the polling commission is a very fragile structure that can be blocked easily. There are many ways to do this: hold its members by force, take away their computers, and so on. There is no security and nobody to rely on. The members of the polling commission are the last group who oppose the separatists and support a united Ukraine. Yet Kiev is doing nothing to help them with the election. Three days before the vote, the chairman of the commission whose session I attended is kidnapped. In the end, no polling station in Donetsk will be open. In the entire region voting will take place in 20 percent of the stations and a little more than 10 percent of the voters will cast their ballots.