The campaign billboards in this city suggested a tight race between Aleksandr Zakharchenko and Aleksandr Zakharchenko.
As voters in rebel-held areas of Ukraine went to the polls on Sunday, in defiance of the central government, the European Union and the United States, the only visible campaign advertising in Donetsk was in support of the current separatist leader, Mr. Zakharchenko, who is, not surprisingly, expected to win.
Rather than offering a range of plausible opposition candidates, the voting for members of Parliament and heads of state in Donetsk and the other breakaway region of eastern Ukraine, Luhansk, was significant for highlighting Ukraine’s loss of control over these territories, and Russia’s strengthening influence.
The elections will likely cement the status quo for Luhansk and Donetsk, which have been controlled in large part by pro-Russian separatists since the spring. Russia has said it will recognize the results, while Ukraine, along with European governments and the United States, has said it will not, maintaining that the elections violated a cease-fire agreement signed in Minsk in September.
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The cease-fire, which has been unraveling in daily shooting along the front lines, called for local elections to take place under Ukrainian law, and Kiev has scheduled city and village votes for Dec. 7. However, rebel leaders say they have no intention of allowing them to take place in Donetsk and Luhansk, and scheduled their vote for Sunday instead.
“We hope that it will be a free declaration of will and that nobody will try to ruin it from the outside,” Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia told the Russian newspaper Izvestia.
Western governments, including Germany and France, have called on Russia to refrain from recognizing the rebel votes. Secretary of State John Kerry called the elections a “clear violation” of the Minsk agreement.
Rebel election officials said about half a million people had voted by midafternoon in Donetsk, amid rising military tensions. The Ukrainian military said Sunday that Russia had in recent days bolstered equipment supplies to separatists. On Saturday, a column of 62 military trucks, including several carrying rocket launchers, drove through Donetsk.
Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly last week for the pro-European political parties led by President Petro O. Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk; the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk did not take part in those elections and scheduled their own.
In an effort to draw voters to an election lacking suspense — as the existing rebel leaders, including Mr. Zakharchenko, a former electrician, seem sure to stay on — polling stations opened Sunday in Donetsk schools with gigantic piles of cabbage, potatoes, carrots, beets and onions in the yards outside; at one site, the vegetables were sold at far below market price. At other sites organizers gave the vegetables away. Several polling stations offered live entertainment, ranging from a three-member Slavic folk band to a man playing an accordion.
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In a practice common in authoritarian post-Soviet countries, one candidate in Donetsk endorsed his opponent, Mr. Zakharchenko, in the race. In a 2012 presidential race in Turkmenistan, for example, nominally competing candidates gave speeches standing in front of giant posters of the incumbent, who won.
“We don’t have any differences, none at all,” Yuri V. Sivokonenko, the head of a police union and candidate for head of state, said in an interview. “I didn’t ask people to vote for me, because I don’t have any differences in principle with Zakharchenko.”
Mr. Sivokonenko said he had put up no campaign advertising because he lacked funds for it. A deputy speaker of the Parliament of Novorossia, Aleksandr Kofman, was also on the ballot but ran a low-profile campaign. No candidates ran in open opposition to the current rebel leadership. The overriding goal of the election, Mr. Sivokonenko said, was to boost the legitimacy of the separatists’ state. “By the end of the day, the Donetsk People’s Republic will have a new status,” he said. “The election confirms our status as a state.”
Posters and billboards put up by the rebel central election commission echoed this sentiment. “When Ukraine died in our hearts, the Donetsk People’s Republic was born,” one poster at a polling station said. It presented the advantages of the elections as allowing the rebel state to “retain taxes and pay pensions,” guaranteeing the right to speak Russian and opening the Russian market for Donetsk-area exports.
The speaker of the Donetsk Supreme Soviet, Boris O. Litvinov, said in an interview there were only “very, very small differences” between the candidates running, but the election was necessary. “Nobody will speak with revolutionaries these days,” he said. “That’s just the way of the world. We need a democratic state.”
Several voters said the election would compel Kiev to negotiate with separatists and end the war. “Now we will have a leader who can cooperate with other leaders,” Tatyana Buncherenko, 41, a railroad employee, said. “I will vote for Zakharchenko,” she said.
“We will have a beautiful future,” Larisa Petrenko, a doctor, said at one polling station where Russian music was playing. “Our stipends and pensions will be paid and the factories will work. We will have a leader who can negotiate.”
Long lines formed at polling stations in Donetsk. No voter lists existed, raising the risk of duplicate voting. The Donetsk People’s Republic accepted ballots sent by email if voters attached a scanned copy of a passport.
Aleksandr A. Prokhanov, the editor in chief of the Russian nationalist newspaper Zavtra, who has advised separatist field commanders including Mr. Zakharchenko on ideological questions, said in an interview over the weekend that the Donetsk People’s Republic would not be bound by rigid Western ideas of democracy.
“There are elections when you choose between A and B, and then there are the more difficult ones when you choose between A and A,” he said. “You are a liberal, so you do not understand this. In the Russian consciousness, you can choose between A and A and A, and choosing between an infinite number of A’s is true freedom.”
