The rebel-held eastern regions of Ukraine held peculiar elections Sunday — not because a cow, literally, could have voted it in, or because it was observed by an illegitimate clone of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The most striking feature is that nobody really cared who would win: The fundamental question is whether Russia would help the region's two self-proclaimed people's republics to expand beyond the ragged bit of territory they now hold.
Technically Sunday's elections were not supposed to take place. Last month, the separatist rebels, the Ukrainian government, Russia and OSCE mediators signed a cease-fire protocol in Minsk, Belarus. It stipulated that elections to the local governments in rebel-held areas were to be held under a Ukrainian law that would grant the lands a special status. Ukraine promptly passed the law, setting the elections for Dec. 7. The rebels, however, ignored it and decided on Nov. 2 as their date.
That, naturally, made officials in Kiev unhappy. "Phoney elections on occupied territories have nothing to do with expression of people's will and violate Minsk accords," Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko tweeted. On the other hand, Ukraine itself has no intention of following its special status law. It mentions Ukrainian financial support for the regions' "social and economic development," but the bureaucrats and politicians I talked to in Kiev last week told me the government would not spend a cent on the rebel-held areas: It has plenty of problems in the part of Ukraine it controls. Kiev has not paid out pensions and public sector salaries in the separatist regions since the summer.