May 26. /ITAR-TASS/. Snap presidential elections took place in Ukraine May 25. Presidential nominee, business tycoon Petro Poroshenko, according to preliminary results, scored over 50% of votes.

USA: “People of Ukraine made their voices heard”

US President Barack Obama is satisfied with the snap presidential elections in Ukraine. A spokesperson for the US Administration made this statement to journalists who accompanied Obama in his trip to Afghanistan. He said the sense of stability, which could be brought by the election results in Ukraine, would be a highly positive pace of events.

Earlier, the White House’s press service issued a written statement by Obama, who expressed the view that “the people of Ukraine made their voices heard by voting in their presidential election”. “The United States looks forward to working with the next President, as well as the democratically elected parliament,” the president added. He said that the USA would “continue to support Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”. In Obama’s view, the elections became “another important step forward in the efforts of the Ukrainian government to unify the country and reach out to all of its citizens to ensure their concerns are addressed and aspirations met”. However, Obama does not specify, how the alleged care of Kiev authorities on the people of Ukraine correlates with the large-scale military operation in a major part of the country.

“Throughout the last few months, the Ukrainian people have repeatedly demonstrated their desire to choose their leaders without interference and to live in a democracy where they can determine their own future free of violence and intimidation,” Obama believes.

EU expects assessment from ODIHR

The European Union will make an official statement on Monday upon the results of presidential elections in Ukraine after the observers’ mission from the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the OSCE gives its assessment, a spokesperson for the European Commission told ITAR-TASS.

He added that a joint statement by the European Council and European Commission chairs Herman Van Rompuy and Jose Manuel Barroso was expected.

European Council: “The elections may be assessed as positive”

Gudrun Mosler-Törnström, representative of the European Council delegation, who leads the Congress for observing snap local elections, called the presidential polls in Ukraine “positive” and “corresponding to European standards”. “Given the situation, in which the voting took place, these elections may be assessed as positive,” she noted.

A group of observers from the European Council was monitoring the voting at the local legislature’s elections in the city of Kiev and Kiev region, Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, Fastiv, Vasylkiv, Cherkassy, Kaniv, Pryluky, Sumy, Rivne, Chernihiv, Monastyrshchyna and Bilopillia. In particular, according to the delegation’s head, the observers visited 122 electoral wards.

Noting that the practice of holding local elections in Ukraine “has significantly improved as compared to 2010, when such polls took place the last time”, the representative has also pointed to a number of issues, namely the insufficient number of members of local election committees, queues, which appear as a result of that, as well as lack of clear instructions on how exactly the ballots should be given to voters in order to vote for the president or local authorities. As a result, the counting of votes significantly slowed down, since the ballots of the presidential polls and local elections were put in the same boxes. This problem was very noticeable in Kiev, where voters had to choose out of 102 names included in the ballots, and some people needed more than 20 minutes to cast a vote. The representative recommended the Ukrainian authorities not to coincide local elections with other polls in the future.

Germany hopes for stabilization in Ukraine after elections

According to spokesperson for Germany’s Cabinet Steffen Seibert, the elections “clearly let know that the Ukrainians wish to jointly overcome the state crisis through democratic means”. “This indeed may lead to stabilization of the situation,” he added.

Meanwhile, he believes it is necessary “that Russia builds constructive relations with the new Ukrainian leadership”.