Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says Ukraine will “defend” its citizens in Russian-occupied regions as Moscow prepares to formally annex them after so-called referendums that have already been denounced by the West.
“This charade in the occupied territory cannot even be called an imitation of referendums,” Zelenskiy said in a video posted on Telegram on Tuesday.
“We will act to protect our people: both in the Kherson region, in the Zaporizhzhia region, in the Donbas, in the currently occupied areas of the Kharkiv region and in Crimea.”
Western officials have said Russia is using the referendum and the threat of nuclear weapons to deter continued support for Ukraine, but said it won’t work.
The United States has said it will continue to support Ukraine’s bid to retake occupied territories that Russia plans to annex next week. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said late Tuesday that Washington would propose a U.N. Security Council resolution to condemn Russia’s “fake” vote. The resolution would also urge member states not to recognize any altered state of Ukraine and demand that Russia withdraw its troops from its neighbor, he tweeted.
Once annexed, the Russian leadership has said it will consider attacks on Russian-controlled areas a direct attack on Russia.
In a speech announcing the referendums, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to respond with nuclear weapons if Russia’s national security was threatened.
The four-day-long mock referendum in the Russian-occupied regions concluded on Tuesday, and as predicted, the results reported by Russian state media showed overwhelming support for joining Russia.
“Ukraine has the absolute right to defend itself throughout its territory, including to reclaim territory that Russia has illegally occupied in one way or another,” said US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. at a press conference with India’s foreign affairs. Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. “The weapons that we’ve been providing them have been very effective in enabling them to do just that.”
The head of foreign policy of the European Union, Josep Borrell, also spoke out on Wednesday by describing the ballot boxes as “illegal” and describing the results as “falsified”.
Dmitri Medvedev, Russian president from 2008 to 2012 and now vice-chairman of the Russian security council, warned on Telegram that “the invasion of Russian territory is a crime that allows the use of all self-defense forces… That’s why these referendums are so feared in Kyiv and the West”.
The occupation leaders installed in the Kremlin quickly appealed to Putin with a request to annex their territories. Denis Pushilin, the head of the Russian People’s Republic of Donetsk, said he will travel to Moscow to prepare for a formal annexation. Occupation officials stationed in Luhansk and Kherson also made public appeals to the Russian president. In his appeal, Volodymyr Saldo, head of the puppet government in Kherson, said the region aimed to become an “indelible” part of Russia. He was also filmed receiving a Russian passport on Wednesday.
The UK has already sanctioned 33 people involved in organizing the so-called referendum and EU Foreign Affairs Representative Borrell has said the EU plans to do the same.
Blinken said the US will impose additional sanctions if Russia follows through on its annexation plans. He said Russia was involved in a “diabolical scheme” whereby Russia had relocated the local population, some of whom had since disappeared.
“Then they bring the Russians in, they install puppet governments and then they take part in the referendum and in any case manipulate the result to claim that the territory belongs to Russia through annexation,” Blinken said.
Luhansk governor-in-exile Serhiy Haidai wrote on Telegram that the voting figures claimed by the occupying authorities match the same number of people who were eligible to vote in 2012, before the mass displacement of people from the region after the 2014 war and plenum. – invasion on a scale of 2022.
“We will take into account the hundreds of thousands of evacuees and immigrants,” Haidai said.
The alleged percentage of ballots choosing to join Russia ranged from 87% to 99.2% in the four regions of Ukraine occupied by Russia. Russia controls almost all of Kherson and Luhansk regions, but only parts of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
The total area that will become a de facto part of Russia is about 15% of Ukraine and includes about 4 million people.
Russian state media initially reported that Vladimir Putin would announce the official annexation in an address scheduled for Friday, but it now appears likely to be next October 4. Putin said on Tuesday that Russia wanted to “save the people” in the territories.
Announcements that senior occupation officials will travel to Moscow on Wednesday indicated that a formal annexation could be declared by the end of the week. Russian media have also reported that companies are asking employees to attend a pro-war concert scheduled for Friday to celebrate “referendums” held on the new territories.
The UN said it was committed to Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its recognized borders.
Earlier, in an address to the UN Security Council, Zelenskiy warned that Ukraine would not be able to negotiate with Russia after the votes.
“Russia’s recognition of pseudo-referendums as ‘normal’, implementation of the so-called Crimean scenario and another attempt to annex Ukrainian territory means there is nothing to talk about,” he said in a message from video
“Before the eyes of the whole world, Russia is conducting an outright sham called a ‘referendum’ on the occupied territory of Ukraine,” he said.
“People are forced to fill out some papers for a television picture under the muzzle of machine guns. The figures of the supposed results of the pseudo-referendum were extracted in advance”.
With Agence France-Presse