Ukraine votes in snap polls

• People in Luhansk and Donetsk did not take part in the vote
• Prez Petro Poroshenko’s bloc to emerge as the leading party

Kiev: Ukrainians voted on Sunday for a new parliament in elections meant to complete a historic shift from Russia's sphere of influence, but which will sharpen the war-torn country's internal divisions.

The snap election, coming eight months after a street revolt overthrew Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovych, is expected to result in a legislature filled with reformers and nationalists backing President Petro Poroshenko's drive to bring Ukraine closer to the West.

However, Poroshenko's party is unlikely to win a straight majority, meaning he may have to seek a coalition with more radical nationalists suspicious of his attempts to negotiate peace with pro-Russian rebels controlling a swathe of the country's industrial east.

The trauma of some 3,700 deaths in the fighting, and Russia's earlier annexation of the southern Crimean region, set a grim backdrop to an election originally intended as a finishing touch to Ukraine's pro-democracy revolution.

Voters in Crimea and in separatist-controlled areas of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces -- about five million of Ukraine's 36.5 million-strong electorate -- were effectively shut out from the election. Twenty seven seats in the 450-seat parliament will remain empty.

As a result, the previously peaceful divide between the mostly Russian-speaking and Russia-leaning east and the more Ukrainian-speaking west has become a deadly -- and increasingly formal -- faultline threatening the country's future.

The Petro Poroshenko Bloc was forecast to emerge as the leading party of what Poroshenko described on the eve of voting as "an entirely new parliament" that was "reforming, not corrupt, pro-Ukrainian and pro-European, not pro-Soviet."

For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party was not expected to clear the five-percent barrier for entering parliament under proportional representation. Poroshenko, elected president in May with 55 percent of the vote, hopes that failure represents an irreversible political shift.

Polls show a majority of Ukrainians support economic and democratic reforms -- especially a crackdown on corruption -- leading eventually to European Union membership. However, there is less unity over how to resolve the dismemberment of the country in Russia's occupation of Crimea and the separatist battle in the east.