Interfax: LPR to hold elections on November 1 – Plotnitsky

LUHANSK. Aug 7 (Interfax) – The leader of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), Igor Plotnitsky, has said that the local government elections scheduled for November 1, 2015, will be held regardless of Kyiv’s stance on the matter.

“We declared them [the elections] and we will hold them whether Ukraine wants it or not,” he told members of the LPR people’s police on Friday.

“They don’t want it. They are trying to pass their own laws for us to comply with what they want. This is not going to happen,” said the LPR leader.

Earlier on Friday the leaders of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), too, finally decided on an election date.

“October 18 is the final date. One of these days we will be meeting with LPR representatives to discuss the matter,” DPR leader Alexander Zakharchenko told reporters.

Commenting on the ‘Local elections’ law published on Friday in the gazette of the Ukrainian Vekhovna Rada, LPR people’s council speaker Alexei Karyakin said that, “if the current government in Ukraine had genuinely considered Donbas to be part of Ukraine and wanted to hold free elections here, it would have done whatever is possible and even impossible at talks in order to implement the Minsk agreements.”

“Kyiv’s policy is one of war until [a] victorious end, blockades, ultimatums, full non-recognition of the natural right of a people to self-determination even in the framework of an extremely limited special status spelt out in the set of measures,” the LPR people’s council speaker said, according to the Luhansk Information Center.

“This is why the point is not only that the law was passed without us being consulted. For us, to agree to an aggressor’s elections would be tantamount to helping a pack of wolves organize a voting by lambs,” Karyakin said.