Pro-Russian rebels voted in an election to set up a separatist leadership in eastern Ukraine yesterday, taking the war-torn region closer to Russia and defying Kiev and the West, as shelling continued across the territory.

The separatists’ election of a leader and People’s Council is the latest twist in a face-off between Russia and the West that started with Ukraine’s ouster of a Moscow-backed president in February and the installation of a pro-European leadership.

Kiev says vote in Donetsk, Luhansk regions violates series of agreements

In Donetsk, eastern Ukraine’s former industrial capital and the separatists’ political and military stronghold, Soviet music blared out of speakers in front of a central voting station carrying the separatist’s red black and blue flag.

Across the region suffering from years of neglect and months of war between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian rebels, people stood in freezing temperatures to cast their vote. Vendors brought truckloads of carrots, potatoes and cabbages to polling stations where they were sold off for pennies to those waiting in line.

A pro-Russian separatist casts a ballot during the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic leadership and local parliamentary elections in the southern town of Novoazovsk, Ukraine, yesterday.Photos: Reuters

Some of the heaviest artillery shelling of the past few weeks could be heard in the predominantly Russian-speaking area hours before voting was to begin. Rebels said more artillery was heard in a northern district of Donetsk during the vote.

Ukraine’s military said three of its soldiers had been killed in the past 24 hours, two of them by an explosion at a check point near the city of Mariupol, which is under Ukrainian control. Kiev says the vote in its Donetsk and Luhansk regions violates a series of agreements known as the Minsk protocol that underpins a September 5 ceasefire between the rebels and Kiev.

Although sporadically broken, the truce has allowed a semblance of normality to return to Donetsk following violence that has killed more than 4,000 people in the region. Kiev says the agreements, signed by rebel leaders and envoys from Kiev, Russia and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe arrange for elections held under Ukrainian law that would appoint purely local officials.

But the rebels’ plan to elect leaders and institutions in a breakaway territory in the regions of Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk violates that agreement, Kiev says.

The poll will further strain relations between the West and Russia after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow would recognise the vote on Friday,

Alexander Zakharchenko, the current rebel prime minister, is almost certain to win the vote for the leadership of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.

A 38-year-old former mining electrician who uses colourful language, Zakharchenko has compared the region’s coal deposits to the oil reserves in the United Arab Emirates and has promised pensioners a stipend that will allow them to go on safari in Australia.