Campaign in the Crimea is becoming criminal

Andriy Krisko, Head of the Crimean Branch of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine [CVU] has expressed grave concern over the increasingly wide-scale use of illegal activities during the election campaign in the Crimea.

He says that the number of infringements of the Criminal Code at the final stage of the election campaign has increased considerably. Just over the last two days CUV has recorded four such cases concerning different political forces.

“The website of the Crimean branch of the Party of the Regions was block and false information supposedly from its leader Anatoly Mohylyov was circulated via a clone site. That is already not black PR but at very least a violation of Article 361 of the Criminal Code.

There was an analogous situation with the DDOS attacks on the information resources of the Batkivshchyna Party and the site of Leonid Grach. There are also some indicators of the criminal offence of printing and circulating a clone newspaper supposedly from the Udar Party in Simferopol.”

He also noted that despite denials published by the Party of the Regions Press Service and the Department of Information Policy of the Crimean Parliament, one television channel ran a news story based solely on information from the clone website. An analogous situation was seen with respect to the Udar Party, where information about the party’s leader on a clone website was then circulated in the media by his political opponents.

CVU is therefore concerned as to whether members of political parties will refrain from violations of legislation on Voting Day if 2 weeks before the elections the number of offences linked with the election campaign is already becoming large-scale.  It calls on all participants in the elections to keep to civilized methods of political battle and on journalists to maintain professional ethics and to refrain from publish unverified information.