Voters in Ukraine will on Sunday cast their ballots to choose their sixth president, in the first test for incumbent Petro Poroshenko since he entered the top office in 2014 on the wave of the so-called Revolution of Dignity.
About 35 million people are eligible to vote, but several million of them in the Russian-annexed Crimea and the rebel-held parts of eastern Ukraine are unable or unwilling to cast their ballots.
Polls on Sunday will open at 8am (06:00 GMT) and close at 8pm (20:00 GMT). An early count is expected on Monday. If none of the candidates secures 50 percent of the vote, a runoff between the top two candidates will take place on April 21.
The race is contested by 39 contenders, but only three of them have a realistic chance of winning, according to opinion polls.
The latest surveys show comedian and political novice Volodymyr Zelensky leading with 20.6 percent, followed by opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko with about 13 percent.
Poroshenko, who is projected to come third with 12.9 percent, said last week he would accept the result of the vote, “whoever wins”.
“I am ready to accept the victory of the Ukrainian people, because fair elections are a victory for the Ukrainian people,” he told the Ukraina TV.
The vote will be monitored by observers from 18 countries as well as 139 Ukrainian civil society organisations, according to Ukraine’s Central Election Commission (CEC).
Some international watchdog organisations have voiced worries that among those accredited by by the CEC were Ukrainian far-right groups.
In an interim report earlier this month, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights said that nearly all of its “interlocutors expressed concerns about the affiliation of many of these NGOs to particular candidates and doubted their intention to conduct election observation activities impartially”.
International watchdogs such as Human Rights Watch and Freedom House have also expressed worries about the inclusion of “the right-wing extremist forces” in the process.