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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The new Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of the Ukraine, elected on Sunday, will have an overwhelming national mandate to negotiate peace terms to end the five-year civil war.

Sluha Narodu (“Servant of the People”), the party of President Volodymyr Zelensky, having won more than 43% of the votes countrywide, will now command majorities of both the party-list and the single-constituency seats in the new parliament; 253 seats altogether out of 422, or a “mono-coalition” as the party is calling the result, or as the hostile Ukrainian media term it, “a landslide [which] has never occurred in the contemporary history of Ukraine and it is more typical for post-Soviet Asian dictatorships.”  

This beats earlier pollster predictions that Zelensky would be forced into a coalition with Holos (“The Voice”), a US-invented spoiler organization of Lvov region (Galicia) led by pop singer, Svyatoslav Vakarchuk.  He ended up  with less than 6% of the national votes, fewer than forecast. Holos has proved to be neither the voice of youth, nor an organization without oligarch support (it was backed by Victor Pinchuk), nor a political party at all.

Polling better than predicted was the Donbass (Donetsk, Lugansk regions) party, Opposition Platform led by Victor Medvedchuk, which ended up with 13% nationally; 48% in Lugansk; 42% in Donetsk; 24% in Odessa; and 19% in Nikolaev. If the additional votes of the eastern Opposition Bloc of Boris Kolesnikov and Vadim Novinsky are counted with Medvedchuk’s aggregate, together they have drawn majorities of 53% to 54%, putting Zelensky’s party in the east in a minority.

This is the first time democracy has defeated a US Government-installed putsch and junta in Europe since the election of Andreas Papandreou’s Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in 1982.

To identify the results of the party-list balloting region by region, read this interactive map (lead image) from the Central Election Commission,  published in Russian by the BBC.   The results reported are those at 8 o’clock on Monday evening, with just over 82% of the votes counted.

Overall, the national turnout was 49.8%. This compares with the official records of 57.4% in the parliament election of 2012; 51.9% in 2014. In the presidential election’s first round on March 31, voter turnout was 68.9%; in the second round on April 21, 68.1%.  


Source: http://euromaidanpress.com/

Not only is Sunday’s turnout percentage smaller than the earlier elections. It is much lower than the US Government-financed poll of May, which reported 68% of a nationwide sample saying they definitely intended to vote.   In June, the Rating agency of Kiev said its survey showed “69% expressed definite intention to vote in the early elections to the Verkhovna Rada on July 21, 2019. 15% indicated that they were rather likely to participate, 12% would not vote.”  

The Razumkov Centre poll of late June, paid for by the Dutch government,  came closest,  with 51.3% of those polled saying they were certain they would vote. 

By contrast, the significant discrepancy in the pollsters’ turnout prediction did not miss the election result for Zelensky’s party – the forecast and the outcome have come within the sampling error margin of one or two percentage points. The expected vote result for Poroshenko’s and Tymoshenko’s parties turned out to be smaller than the forecasts, suggesting  their supporters sat on their hands on polling day.  The Medvedchuk party did better than forecast.


KEY: Green=Zelensky party; blue=Medvedchuk party; orange, European Solidarity party of ex-president Petro Poroshenko; brown=Batkivshchina (“Fatherland”) party of ex-prime minister Yula Timoshenko; red=party of Vakarchuk; light green=Radical Party of Oleg Lyashko; grey=Sila I Chest (“Strength and Honour”), party of Igor Smeshko; ; dark blue=Opposition Bloc, party of Boris Kolesnikov and Vadim Novinsky. For representation, parties had to draw above 5% nationally. Source: https://www.bbc.com/

Here are the party vote results in eastern Ukraine for the parts of Donetsk and Lugansk regions which have not seceded to form their own governments:  


Source: https://www.bbc.com/

And here are the results in the southern regions of Odessa and Nikolaev. In the city of Odessa, it can be seen that 29% of voters support the two parties with the strongest commitment to negotiating an end to the war.



Source: https://www.bbc.com/

In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, in the geographic centre of the country, turnout was no better than the national average. But Poroshenko’s supporters managed their best showing of almost 17%, while Vakarchuk drew almost 10%. They depend not only on the financing of the oligarch Victor Pinchuk, but also on the distribution of US, Canadian and international cash into the regime’s budget and banks since the putsch of February 2014.

For more detailed analysis, read this story and this one. 


Source: https://www.bbc.com/

The one region of Ukraine which wants to continue the war is the furthest from the eastern front.  This is the Galician region which welcomed the German Army’s occupation during World War II, and which participated in the destruction of the Jewish, Polish and Russian communities of the area. The Galician region is the home of the Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian military commanders participating in the war, the Canadian ambassador in Kiev, and of the majority of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the US.

The party vote for Lvov (Lviv) shows that Vakarchuk led with almost 24%, followed by Poroshenko, Tymoshenko, and the fanatical Svoboda (“Freedom”) group with 5%. This is Adolph Hitler country.


Source: https://www.bbc.com/

Galicia is also the region whence Freeland despatched the Ottawa-funded Canadian election observer mission, led by Lloyd Axworthy, Canada’s foreign minister between 1996 and 2000. 

Freeland’s tweets have yet to acknowledge that the outcome of the Ukrainian vote has been the repudiation of every position she and the Galician lobbies in Ottawa and Washington have promoted. For their policy of “red lines”,  read the “Joint Statement of civil society representatives”, issued on May 23. 


Source: https://twitter.com/

The defeat of Pinchuk in Sunday’s election was hinted at by President Vladimir Putin in an interview he gave at the Kremlin on Friday evening last.   Although he doesn’t name Pinchuk, he refers to Pinchuk’s funding of the Clinton family and of Washington think-tanks and lobbyists backing the 2014 putsch and then Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the US presidency in 2016. “It is perfectly obvious that Ukrainian oligarchs gave money to Trump’s opponents,” Putin said. “I do not know whether they did this by themselves or with the knowledge of the authorities. [Oliver Stone: Were they giving information to the Clinton campaign? Vladimir Putin:] I do not know. I am being honest. I will not speak about what I do not know. I have enough problems of my own. They assumed Mrs Clinton would win and did everything to show loyalty to the future US administration. That is nothing special. They wanted the future President to have a good opinion of them. This is why they allowed themselves to make unflattering statements about Trump and supported the Democrats in every possible way. This is no secret at all. They acted almost in public.”

For the first reports of Pinchuk’s financial operations with the Clinton family, start here.  The money Pinchuk gave the Clintons included funds stolen from a Russian automobile insurance company; from International Monetary Fund (IMF) transfers to his bank Credit Dnepr;   and from import duty concessions issued by the Obama Administration to Pinchuk’s defaulting pipemaker, Interpipe.   

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