IF they weren't worried, they were wary. Knocks on the door and questions about political allegiance come with connotations in their part of the world.

Andrew Barrand was finding out just how much he took for granted as the agent for Leominster Conservatives.

Back home would-be councillors and MPs are expected out on the stump.

But Andrew was in rural Ukraine where years of authoritarian one-party rule made voting the stuff of suspicion - let alone talking about your politics to strangers at the door.

It was even tough to get questions going when candidates took their campaigns to town and village halls. Andrew is used to audiences all too ready to have a go.

With an electoral lull in Leominster, Andrew took up a friend's offer to help a small party fight Ukraine's first proper parliamentary election, which went ahead this week. The Ne Tak Party hoped proportional representation would make some of its people MPs. It needed the experience of people like Andrew to introduce basic concepts like canvassing to the candidates, their staff - and voters.

Everything that seemed second nature to Andrew had to be made entirely new over his seven weeks travelling with a Ne Tak team throughout eastern Ukraine and the Crimea.

Where doorstep suspicions were won over, the responses were all too familiar, the same laments like schools and taxes that he could have heard in Leominster - only not in sub-zero temperatures.

This was, though, a world where the horse and cart and the well were still staples of rural life.

"At times," said, Andrew, "it was hard to believe we were in the 21st century. You see just how much we take for granted.