Zakharchenko has easily won rebel vote in eastern Ukraine

As said vote’s organisers, Alexander Zakharchenko has easily won an election for leadership of a breakaway republic in eastern Ukraine.
Sunday’s vote took place in defiance of Kiev’s pro-Western authorities and was certain to worsen the standoff between Russia and the West over the future of Ukraine.
«The central election commission deems Alexander Zakharchenko to be the elected head of the Donetsk People’s Republic,» an election official, Roman Lyagin, told journalists in Donetsk, the separatists’ political and military stronghold in eastern Ukraine.
Zakharchenko, 38, a mining electrician-turned-rebel leader, had received 765,340 votes, Lyagin said, which appeared to represent 79 percent of the vote.
Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Petro Poroshenko, denounced the vote on Sunday night as a «farce conducted under the barrels of tanks and machine guns». He said it violated a Sept. 5 agreement reached in the Belarussian capital, Minsk, which had also been signed by Russia.
The United States and the European Union also denounced the vote as illegitimate and in contradiction of the Minsk protocol. Attention will now focus on the Kremlin and how Russian President Vladimir Putin will react to the vote.
He has been urged by European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, not to recognise the validity of the election though his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, suggested last week that Moscow would.

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