 The Ukrainian Census of 2001 was criticized by Dr. Ion Popescu, leader of the National Council of the Interregional Union of the Romanian Community in Ukraine and also one of the authors of the Constitution of Ukraine, who claims that the very existence of the classification of Moldovans as a separate ethnic group in census results is a "continuation of the Stalinist and Soviet policies of artificially dividing Romanians into Romanians and Moldovans".However, the response to the census question about the ethnicity had to be written in into the census form rather than picked from a pre-determined set of choices and the census respondents were free to claim their ethnicity as they wished  not to respond to this or any other particular census question or not answer any questions at all; besides, no allegation of counting fraud were ever brought up.It is therefore unclear if Dr. Popescu criticizes the way in which the census was conducted or the way in which data was processed.