UKR-TAZ

“For the first time since independence, Ukraine elected a president on the first ballot. It was a high hurdle: to win outright, a candidate needed to attract more than 50 per cent of the vote, a challenge in a field of 17 candidates.

“Petro Poroshenko achieved that overwhelming support not because he is a charismatic campaigner or a massively popular politician. He won because he supported the maidan from the start, he is competent and he was the front-runner. His campaign slogan was “to stop the war, let’s elect a president on the first ballot.” Ukrainians overwhelmingly accepted that argument — Poroshenko will be Ukraine’s first president elected with strong backing in all regions of the country.”

Putting the vote into broader context, Freeland continues:

“But there was one partisan aspect to the race that is worth noting, particularly outside the country. From the outset, the Kremlin caricatured the maidan as a far-right fascist movement. This propaganda was so effective that even foreign observers generally sympathetic to Kyiv took to lecturing Ukrainians not to give in to the dark, nationalistic impulses the maidan threatened to unleash.

“Ukrainians, whose revolution was launched with a Facebook post by a Muslim, Afghan refugee and who have just elected a president who didn’t learn Ukrainian until the late 1990s, who speaks Russian at home and who comes from the Russian-speaking south, understood this was never at issue.

“Sunday’s ballot should end this debate everywhere else, too — Vadim Rabinovich, an independent candidate who is chairman of the European Jewish Parliament, won 2 per cent of the vote. That isn’t much, but it is more than either of the two far-right candidates whom the Kremlin portrayed as on the verge of seizing power. They each polled barely 1 per cent. (Amusingly, one Russian television channel actually broadcast purported exit polls on Sunday night alleging that one of these two candidates was in the lead.)”