LUHANSK, November 3 (RIA Novosti) – The current chief of the self-proclaimed People's Republic of Luhansk (LPR), Igor Plotnitsky, is leading in LPR elections with 63.17 percent of the votes, the republic's Central Election Commission has announced.
"As of now, 27.8 percent of the ballots have been counted. According to preliminary results…Plotnitsky [has] 63.17 percent [of the votes]," the head of the LPR Central Election Commission said at a press conference Sunday.
Plotnitsky competed for a four-year presidency with LPR health minister Irina Airapetyan and businessman Viktor Penner.
On Sunday, the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics held elections of the heads of the local governments and representatives of the legislative bodies.
A total of 100 observers from a number of European countries and the United States arrived in the region to monitor the elections.
The authorities in the European Union and the United States said earlier the elections would come against the Minsk agreement on the regulation of the crisis in Donbas, and that the international community would not recognize them.
Russia, on the contrary, has expressed its intention to recognize the elections and emphasized that not recognizing would run counter to the Minsk protocol and undermine efforts to reach peace settlement in the country.
