Pro-Russian rebels vote to set up a separatist leadership in eastern Ukraine

Pro-Russian rebels voted to set up a separatist leadership in eastern Ukraine on Sunday, aiming to take the war-torn region closer to Russia and defying Kiev and the West, as shelling continued across the territory.
The United States and European Union have denounced the vote as illegitimate, which is sure to stoke tensions further between the West and Russia.
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 overthrow of a Moscow-backed president in February and the installation of a pro-European leadership.
In Donetsk, eastern Ukraine’s industrial capital and the separatists’ political and military stronghold, people lined up at polling stations. Soviet music blared out of speakers in front of a central voting station, where people sold bags of carrots, potatoes and cabbages for pennies.
Some of the heaviest mortar and artillery shelling in the past few weeks could be heard in the predominantly Russian-speaking area just hours before voting was due to begin.
 Kiev says the vote violates the Minsk protocol that underpins a ceasefire between the rebels and Ukrainian troops.
Although sporadically broken, the ceasefire has allowed a semblance of normality to return to Donetsk following violence that has killed more than 3,700 people in the region.
Kiev says the agreements, signed by rebel leaders and envoys from Kiev, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 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 neighboring Luhansk violates that agreement, Kiev says.

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