KIEV: An exit poll showed that billionaire candy-maker Petro Poroshenko won Ukraine’s presidential election on Sunday in the first round — a vote that authorities hoped would unify the deeply fractured nation.

The ballot took place amid weeks of fighting in the sprawling eastern regions that form Ukraine’s industrial heartland, where pro-Russia separatists have seized government buildings and battled government troops.

The rebels had vowed to block the ballot in the east – and less than 20 per cent of the polling stations were open there. Long lines of voters snaked around polling stations in Kiev, the pro-Western capital, but heavily armed pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine intimidated locals by smashing ballot boxes, shutting down polling centres and issuing threats.

The exit poll for Sunday’s election, conducted by three respected Ukrainian survey agencies, found the 48-year-old candy tycoon Poroshenko getting 55.9pc of the vote.

Dnipropetrovsk (Ukraine): Presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko casts her ballot at a polling station during the presidential election on Sunday.—AP

At a distant second was former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko with 12.9pc, the poll showed.

Full results are expected on Monday in the election that could be a critical step toward resolving Ukraine’s protracted crisis. “The country has got a new president,” a confident and composed Poroshenko told several hundred journalists at his election headquarters.

“I would like to thank everyone for the support that the Ukraine has showed today for me and my team.” The tycoon pledged that his first steps as president will be “to put an end to war, chaos, crime and to bring peace to the Ukrainian land.”

He also said his first visit would be to Donbass, Ukraine’s eastern industrial region. Poroshenko ducked the question whether he was prepared to work with Russian President Vladimir Putin but said Kiev would like to negotiate a new security treaty with Moscow.

The exit poll, which surveyed 17,000 voters at 400 precincts, claimed a margin of error of 2 percentage points, indicating Poroshenko passed the 50-pc mark needed to win without a runoff. It was conducted by the Razumkov Centre, Kiev International Sociology Institute and the Democratic Initiatives Foundation.

“I would like to congratulate Ukraine with the fact that despite the current aggression by the Kremlin and the desire to break this voting, the election happened and was democratic and fair,” Tymoshenko said after the polls closed.

“I think this is the evidence of the strength of our nation.” The election came three months after the country’s pro-Russia leader fled in February, chased from power by months of protests over corruption and his rejection of a pact with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Moscow. It also came two months after Russia annexed Ukraine’s strategic Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.

Published in Dawn, May 26th, 2014