Russia’s sham elections began in occupied Ukrainian territory Friday — long predicted “referendums” as to whether the pieces of sovereign Ukraine should be considered Moscow’s.
The votes — orchestrated by the Kremlin as Russia loses territory on the battlefield — are the first steps in an expected annexation of Ukrainian territory, and have widely been denounced as frauds by Kyiv and the West.
Voting began Friday in the occupied provinces of Luhansk and Kherson, as well as in the portions of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia provinces that are under Russian control.
“Voting has started in the referendum on Zaporizhzhia region becoming a part of Russia as a constituent entity of the Russian Federation!” said Vladimir Rogov, an official in Moscow’s puppet regime in the province. “We are coming home!”
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s exiled leaders from the occupied regions expressed concern for their citizens ahead of the vote.
“Today, the best thing for the people of Kherson would be not to open their doors,” said Yuriy Sobolevsky, an exiled Ukrainian leader from the Kherson province.
In the Luhansk city of Starobilsk, 30 miles northeast of Severodonetsk, Russians were forcing residents out of their homes to vote, according to Serhiy Gaidai, the Ukrainian head of that province.
Closer to the Russian border in Bilovodsk, one businessman reportedly told employees anyone who failed to vote would be fired and reported to occupation security services.
Gaidai called the votes “elections without elections,” and said occupying troops were forcing the votes in residents homes or yards without privacy.
“The mood of the Russians is panicky because they were not ready to carry out so quickly this so-called referendum, there is no support, there’s not enough people,” Sobolevsky said.
The forced votes come after the majority of the peacetime population has fled the occupied regions, and amid reports of the torture and imprisonment of suspected Kyiv loyalists.
The votes, which are expected to go Russia’s way, have been denounced as shams.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitors regional elections, has declared the elections meaningless, saying they conform to neither Ukrainian law nor international election standards.
A similar referendum was used in 2014 as a pretext for Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula, which the international community still regards as part of Ukraine.
Following that annexation, sham referenda were held in smaller regions of Luhansk and Donetsk to declare independent “people’s republics” around those provinces’ eponymous capital cities.
Russia formally recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in the opening hours of February’s invasion.
The votes are seen as a prelude to another round of annexation, which would in turn allow Moscow to claim its unprovoked invasion is a war in defense of Russian nationals.
“Encroachment onto Russian territory is a crime which allows you to use all the forces of self-defense,” Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s security council, said on social media earlier this week.
