I just got an email from a friend, who has been living in Lwiw for over a year now, and he’s telling a few sordid details about the election and the entailing protests:
* Ballot boxes made of glass
* No envelopes to put the voting slip in, which becomes interesting when combined with the glass ballot boxes
* University authorities standing next to ballot boxes watching as students put in their votes
* Employers asking for employees’ passports shortly before the election in order to stop them from voting
* Thousands of people marching the streets of every major city in the Ukraine
* Militia blocking access roads into Kiev by unloading sand, in order to keep protesters out
* National TV ignoring those protests, showing movies and cartoons instead of covering protests
Sounds like a big party to me. I just read that the official election committee announced Moscow-favoured Yanukovych the winner of the election (with a few members of the committee not willing to sign that announcement). Criticism from all over the world regarding that faulty election is being dismissed by Ukrainian officials, as well as Russia’s Putin who called it “inadmissible”. Well, sure, that’s how Russia treats criticism all the time, so why stop now? I’m going to keep posting new isider information as soon as I get some.
Update: Support against totalitarian regimes is great, but hearing US representatives say they don’t accept the result of the election because the proceedings didn’t meet international standards is somehow, uhh, strange.
what’s funny in your first three bullet points is that, as they are from Lwiw in the West, which is overwhelmingly in the opposition camp, this presumably is about voter intimidation in favour of pro-Western Jushchenko, who is generally considered the good guy in this. (?)
Well, I’m not sure inhowfar the stories recounted in the mail pertain to proceedings in Lwiw. It could well be that these are stories circulating in the Ukraine, and have not necessarily happened in Lwiw. I could also imagine that although Lwiw being an opposition outpost, official election proceedings were done by government officials.