“We are the voice of eastern Ukraine, the industrial party of the country and of the real economy,” Yuiry Boyko told the Kyiv Post on Oct. 27.
Yet this voice, while certainly deserving of representation in the legislature in its own right, is precisely the way in which the old discredited Party of Regions is coming in through the back door.
“It is an excellent result,” said Mykhaylo Dobkin former governor of Kharkiv Oblast and number three on the party list. “But we were expecting 20 percent.”
Dobson reportedly absented himself to Russia after deposed president Viktor Yanukovych fled to Moscow in February, but returned to Kharkiv attend a pro-Russian rally. He was then dismissed and later arrested for "leading a separatist movement," but ultimately the charges were dismissed and he was released. He ran in the presidential election, but received only 3.03% of the vote.
While in the parliament formed after the 2002 elections, Dobkin was first with for United Ukraine, then the Social Democratcy Party of Ukraine (united), the party of which he was a member, then in the Party of Regions faction. He then became a member of the political council of the Party of Regions.
Now he is back in the incarnation of the Opposition Bloc.
Originally the Opposition Bloc was not expected to clear the 5% threshold, but as counting is past 75% of returns, the party has 9.63% of results currently. That means at least 30 seats, and as Boyko told Kyiv Post, another 30 seats of independents running in majoritarian districts could be added to the Opposition Bloc in the parliament.
The Opposition Bloc also represents the part of the Donbass that voted:
Translation: How the Donbass voted.
On this exit poll done by Savik Shuster Studio, there are the following results on October 26:
Opposition Bloc 33.30%
Petro Poroshenko Bloc 19.20%
Communist Party 10.00%
Popular Front 6.90%
Samopomich 6.60%
As Ekho Moskvy's editor-in-chief Alexey Venediktov wrote on October 26:
Translation: The coalition of Poroshenko + Yatsenyuk taking into account the single-mandate districts will not reach the constitutional majority of 300 mandates. A third partner is needed.
Will that third coalition partner be Samopomich or Opposition Bloc?
President Poroshenko wrote on his own Twitter feed in English his sense that the Communist Party and the Party of Regions were now history in Ukraine:
But while the Communists may be missing, the Party of Regions figures like Dobkin and other "Regionaires" are back, via the Opposition Bloc.
And that means in part the interests of the "Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics." The "elections-as-lustration" concept did not fully work.
With 75.13% of the votes counted as of 21:15 local time in Kiev, Unian is reporting that the gap between Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko is growing slightly and the Popular Front is edging out ahead:
Popular Front 21.93%
Petro Poroshenko Bloc 21.5%
Samopomich 11.1%
Opposition Bloc 9.63%
Radical Party 7.39%
Batkivshchyna 5.67%
Svoboda is now showing that it has not cleared the 5% threshold to go into the parliament, with only 4.73%.
Ukrainska Pravda is also updating the results and has a visible infographic currently showing the count at 75.09% complete.
This graphic shows the number of seats each can claim:
Poroshenko Bloc 126
Popular Front 82
Samopomich 33
Opposition Bloc 30
Radical Party 22
Batkivshchyna 19
Thus, 110 seats are still to be determined.
The party leaders are from left to right Petro Poroshenko, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Andriy Sadoviy, Yuriy Boyko, Oleh Lyashko, Yulia Timoshenko
Miller is a trusted journalist, so we're looking for more videos which would perhaps give us a sense of how widespread any similar movement may be.
This video was uploaded today. It says it shows Russian vehicles moving toward Crimea. We can't verify the video, and we have not been able to geolocate the video either, but we have not been able to find another example of this video uploaded previously to today:
This tweet gives the latest breakdown of votes counted so far by the Ukrainian Central Election Commission (CEC), as of 18:52 (16:52 GMT).
The top results are as follows:
Dmytro Yarosh's Praviy Sektor lie well outside the 5% vote share required to enter parliament. Their share of the vote is not visible at the bottom of this screen, but must be below 2.74%.21.78% - Popular Front
21.44% - Bloc Petro Poroshenko
11.09 - Samopomich
9.79 - Opposition Bloc
7.39 - Radical Party
5.66 - Batkivshchyna
4.71 - Svoboda
3.94 - Communist Party of Ukraine