PARIS, Nov 11 – The leaders of Ukraine, France and Germany met on Sunday to discuss an escalation following elections held in the sectors of eastern Ukraine, known as Donbas, controlled by Russia-backed separatist rebels.

Ukrainian presidential spokesman Svyatoslav Tsegolko said President Petro Poroshenko met with French President Emanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss the elections.

The leaders of Germany and France, which helped negotiate that accord, dismissed “the illegal and illegitimate elections ... held today despite numerous appeals by the international community.”

“These are elections for entities that have no legitimacy under the Ukrainian constitution,” Kurt Volker, the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine, said last week.

“The people in eastern Ukraine will be better off within a unified Ukraine at peace rather than in a second-rate police state run by crooks and thugs, all subsidized by Russian taxpayers,” he said Sunday on Twitter.

The leaders met in Paris amid the ceremonies commemorating the end of World War I.

The elections for leaders and legislatures in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics were held Sunday. The Ukrainian government and the West have called the elections illegitimate and an attempt by Russia to obstruct resolution of the conflict.

More than 10,000 people have been killed since fighting broke out in 2014 between separatists and Ukrainian forces.

Germany, France and Ukraine are part of the so-called “Normandy format” countries seeking a resolution to the conflict. Russia is the fourth country in the format, which has not held talks in two years.

Residents of the eastern Ukraine regions controlled by Russia-backed separatist rebels voted Sunday for local governments in elections denounced by Kyiv and the West.

The elections were to choose heads of government and legislature members in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, where separatists have fought Ukrainian forces since the spring of 2014 in a war that has killed more than 10,000 people.

Although a 2015 accord on ending the war calls for local elections in Donetsk and Luhansk, critics including Ukraine's president, the U.S. and the European Union say the vote is illegitimate because it is conducted where Ukraine has no control.

But the separatists say the vote is a key step toward establishing full-fledged democracy in the regions.

“It's another exam for the civic position, political position for the whole Donetsk Republic,” said Denis Pushilin, who became acting head of the Donetsk separatist regime since predecessor Alexander Zakharchenko was killed in a restaurant bombing in August.

His Luhansk counterpart, Leonid Pasechnik, said Sunday that “we are a free republic, a free country” and denied that the voting was being held contrary to the 2015 agreement signed in Minsk. (ap/ez)