Pro-Moscow rebels pressed ahead with a referendum on self-rule in east Ukraine yesterday and fighting flared anew in a conflict that could dismember the country and pitch Russia and the West into a new Cold War.
With voting still going on, one separatist leader said the region would form its own state bodies and military after the referendum, formalising a split that began with the armed takeover of state buildings in a dozen eastern towns last month.
A near festive atmosphere at makeshift polling stations in some areas belied the potentially grave implications of the event. In others, clashes broke out between separatists and troops, over ballot papers and control of a TV tower.
Zhenya Denyesh, a 20-year-old student, was second to vote at a concrete three-storey university building in the rebel stronghold of Slaviansk. “I wanted to come as early as I could,” he said. “We all want to live in our own country.”
Asked what he thought would follow the vote, organised by rebels in a matter of weeks, he said: “It will still be war.”
In the southeastern port of Mariupol, scene of fierce fighting last week, there were only eight polling centres for a population of half a million. Queues grew to hundreds of metres in bright sunshine, with spirits high as one centre overflowed and ballot boxes were brought onto the street.
On the eastern outskirts, a little over an hour after polls opened, soldiers from Kiev seized what they said were falsified ballot papers, marked with Yes votes, and detained two men.
Ukraine soldiers say they seized falsified ballot papers marked with Yes votes
They refused to hand the men over to policemen who came to take them away, saying they did not trust them. Instead they waited for state security officers to interview and arrest them.
On the edge of Slaviansk, fighting broke out around a TV tower shortly before people began making their way through barricades of felled trees, tyres and machinery for a vote Western leaders say is being orchestrated by Moscow. The West has threatened more sanctions against Russia in the key areas of energy, financial services and engineering if it continues what they regard as efforts to destabilise Ukraine. Some modest measures may come as soon as today, limited by the EU’s reluctance to upset trade ties with Russia.
Moscow denies any role in the fighting or any ambitions to absorb the mainly Russian-speaking east, an industrial hub, into the Russian Federation following its annexation of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea after a referendum in March.