Why Putin Encouraged Sham Elections in Eastern Ukraine
The vote confirms the Kremlin has reluctantly decided to hang on to the puppet states it helped carve out.
Just a formality?
Photographer: Mikhail Tereshchenko/TASS via Getty Images
The so-called elections on Nov. 11 in the unrecognized “people’s republics” of eastern Ukraine wouldn’t be worthy of discussion if they weren’t further evidence the Kremlin plans to hang on to the territories. In the absence of any international deal he could accept, President Vladimir Putin can only move toward the full recognition of the puppet states, on the model of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The elections conferred a questionable legitimacy on Denis Pushilin, leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, and his counterpart Leonid Pasechnik of the Luhansk People’s Republic. Both were already running the self-proclaimed Donbass statelets. Pushilin acquired power after his predecessor was blown up in a restaurant in August and Pasechnik has been in place since he deposed the previous leader in a bloodless coup a year ago. Both had already been approved by the Kremlin, where Vladislav Surkov, a longtime Putin aide, is in charge of administering the people’s republics. So there was, strictly speaking, no need for the electoral farce.