Pro Russia win in Ukraine vote
Alexander Zakharchenko had received 765,340 votes
Ukraine: Pro-Russian separatist Alexander Zakharchenko has easily won an election for leadership of a breakaway republic in eastern Ukraine, the vote’s organisers said on Monday.
The Sunday’s vote, the climax of a six-month separatist rebellion in Ukraine’s industrialised east, 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 the ex-Soviet republic.
“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 to Reuters, which was equal to 79 per cent of the vote.