Ukraine’s parliament granted a special status to some parts of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast, and defined the new border of those territories in a Tuesday vote that followed complicated negotiations among coalition members and the president, who authored the bills.

A

total of 265 Ukrainian lawmakers backed the decision to give a

special status to the territories, but only after clean and

transparent elections are held on those territories under Ukraine’s

law. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said in his twitter

microblog that such a sequence was create to “prevent clever

manipulations”.