Poroshenko, Zelenskiy, Poroshenko, Zelenskiy…” chants the teller, sing-song, over the flutter of papers. It is shortly before midnight on Sunday in the Ukrainian embassy in Warsaw. Representatives of the country’s presidential candidates are gathered around a conference table to count first-round votes from citizens living here in neighbouring Poland. From a pile in the centre a staffer peels out the long ballot slips—there were 39 candidates—and hands each to his boss who reads out the vote and passes it to the appropriate delegate, who adds it to his or her stack. The piles for Petro Poroshenko, the incumbent, and Volodymyr Zelenskiy, his comedian-turned-politician challenger, are the largest.
Ukraine-European Union Relations
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Ukrainians line up in front of the Ukrainian Embassy in Poland to vote in the first round of the 2019 presidential election on March 31, 2019 in Warsaw.
