So-called “referendums” are being held in the areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops, and residents must vote on proposals for the four regions of Ukraine to declare independence and then join Russia.
The polls, hastily organized after being announced this week, will run until Tuesday. They have been widely condemned in the West as illegitimate and appear to be a small attempt to cover up Moscow’s illegal annexation of the regions.
Russian news agencies said voting in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces began Friday morning.
Russia does not fully control any of the four regions, where military hostilities continue, and much of the population has fled since the war began in February. Parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions have been controlled by Russian proxies since 2014.
President Vladimir Putin has indicated that the Kremlin will use referendums to recognize the territory as Russian, and even threatened this week that Russia would defend the new acquisitions using all available options, including nuclear weapons.
“The invasion of Russian territory is a crime that allows the use of all self-defense forces,” Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and now vice-chairman of the security council, said in a Telegram post on Thursday. “That’s why these referendums are so feared in Kyiv and in the West.”
In Kyiv, officials said the votes would have no effect on the situation on the ground or the Ukrainian military’s counteroffensive.
“There is no referendum. There is a propaganda exercise being called a referendum,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “It doesn’t mean anything. It will be a few staged things where there will be Russian TV cameras.”
Many people in the occupied areas were unclear about how the referendums would be conducted and said there was little publicity or campaigning. The video from Donetsk allegedly showed “mobile polling stations” going from house to house asking people to come to the yard to vote, luring residents with loudspeakers.
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 after a referendum that was also criticized as illegitimate.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which monitors the elections, listed a number of reasons why the referendums would not have legal force: they do not meet international standards, they are against the law Ukraine, the areas are not safe, there will be no independent observers, and much of the population has fled.
Kyiv launched a counteroffensive this month that has retaken swaths of territory, seven months after Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, starting a war that has killed thousands, displaced millions and damaged the global economy.
Referendums had been mooted for months by pro-Moscow authorities, but Ukraine’s recent victories prompted a scramble by officials to schedule them.
With Putin also this week announcing a military draft to enlist 300,000 troops to fight in Ukraine, Moscow appears to be trying to regain the upper hand in the conflict. Russia has said the referendums are an opportunity for people in the region to express their views.
“From the beginning of the operation… we said that the peoples of the respective territories should decide their own destiny, and the whole current situation confirms that they want to be masters of their own destiny,” the affairs minister said Russian foreign affairs, Sergey Lavrov. week
Ukraine says Russia intends to frame the referendum results as a sign of popular support and use them as a pretext for annexation, similar to its 2014 seizure of Crimea, which the community international has not recognized.
Vladimir Vysotsky, the head of the Central Election Commission of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, inspects a polling station ahead of a referendum in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine. Photograph: AP
A result in favor of Russia is considered inevitable. The 2014 Crimean referendum, criticized internationally as rigged, had an official result of 97% in favor of formal annexation.
“If all this is declared Russian territory, they can declare that this is a direct attack on Russia so they can fight without any reservations,” Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Gaidai told Ukrainian television.
The referendums have been denounced by world leaders including US President Joe Biden, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and French President Emmanuel Macron, as well as NATO, the EU and the OSCE. The “mock referendums” were “illegal and illegitimate,” NATO said on Thursday.
The OSCE, which monitors the election, said the results would not have legal force because they did not conform to Ukrainian law or international standards and the areas were unsafe. There will be no independent observers, and much of the pre-war population has fled.
Russia considers Luhansk and Donetsk, which together make up the Donbas region, partially occupied by Moscow in 2014, to be independent states.