Ukraine voters embrace West and peace with rebels

Ukraine's pro-Western and moderately nationalist parties were on course today to score a crushing election win that boosted President Petro Poroshenko's bid to merge his ex-Soviet country with Europe and end a pro-Russian revolt.
A partial vote count and exit polls showed overwhelming support for Poroshenko's drive to break his nation of 45 million out of Russia's orbit despite the painful economic measures the Kremlin has levied on its western neighbour in reprisal.
Results with 30 percent of the precincts reporting had Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's People's Front leading with 21.7 percent of the vote. The president's Petro Poroshenko Bloc was a a hair behind with 21.6 per cent.

Many in Kiev and the West blame the six-month uprising that has killed 3,700 on an attempt by Russian President Vladimir Putin to destabilise Ukraine's new government and create a "frozen conflict" in its vital industrial east.
Parties with links to Moscow or the old Viktor Yanukovych regime that was ousted after his abrupt rejection in February of a landmark EU pact were routed at the ballot boxes yesterday.
"I want the war to end and for our country to join the European Union, although I doubt this will happen very soon," pensioner Bogdan Golobutskiy said as he trudged up to a Kiev polling station yesterday.

Radicals that rejected Poroshenko's peace deal with the insurgents that gave the separatists limited autonomy also had a poor showing as did corruption-tainted politicians who had steered Ukraine through two decades of stuttering reforms.

Analysts said it was almost certain that Poroshenko would now have to share power with Yatsenyuk as premier.
"Voters did not want a monopoly of power in one pair of hands. They voted for a Poroshenko-Yatsenyuk tandem," said Vadym Karasyov of Kiev's Institute of Global Strategies.
A buoyant Poroshenko told the nation that "more than three quarters of voters who took part in the polls gave strong and irreversible backing to Ukraine's path to Europe."

The 49-year-old chocolate baron said a majority also supported his search for "political methods" to end the war in the country's industrial east.
Poroshenko and his slightly more hawkish prime minister are within striking distance of the majority needed to form a stable government that could pursue similar policies to those both back now.
Yatsenyuk is widely expected to keep his premiership post and help Ukraine negotiate new loan agreements with the West.