Dmitry Lubinets
The situation in the 60th electoral district is taking on the characteristics of a true farce. A former member of the Party of Regions, with a trail of corruption scandals behind him, is accusing a young man, a candidate from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, of fraud.
As a reminder, Volnovakha City Council member Dmytro Lubinets, who supported the Revolution of Dignity from the very beginning, won the election in this district. He faces Oleksandr Ryzhenkov, a well-known member of the Party of Regions in Volnovakha. He is associated with the kidnapping of the district election commission head, who was forcibly recaptured from bandits by fighters from the Kyiv-2 Battalion.
"The victory of a pro-Ukrainian candidate, especially one from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, in the Donbas's 60th district is symbolic in itself. There's another Donbas that wants to break with the former Party of Regions, their reincarnation—the Opposition Bloc—all those 'overseers,' 'Akhmetov's men,' and other vestiges of the Yanukovych regime," says Vitaly KULIK, director of the Center for Civil Society Research.
According to him, the campaign in the 60th District itself was difficult and tense. Part of the district is occupied by Russian terrorists, and local government officials are loyal to the Party of Regions. "Most local government officials understand that they will lose their lucrative positions as early as March and are trying to preserve themselves by supporting characters from the past like Ryzhenkov," KULIK asserts.
Everything was used in the district: from covert voter bribery by Ryzhenkov to the use of militants as a means of intimidation. But despite this, voters in the 60s district cast their ballots for the democratic candidate, Dmitry Lubinets.
Vitaly Kulik believes that "Ryzhenkov is currently trying to steal Lubinets' victory by telling fictitious stories about 'falsifications' by the pro-presidential political force. However, Lubinets won by a landslide, according to both the exit poll and the parallel vote count. Now the Party of Regions is trying to find legal errors in the protocols and sue for the polling stations they failed to win."
"In my opinion, Lubinets' victory is a clear victory, and any attempts by local criminals to 'squeeze' this victory must be harshly suppressed by law enforcement," concluded Vitaly Kulik.
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