As Russia began orchestrating staged voting in referendums across Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine on Friday, Ukrainians in those areas expressed a mix of anger, defiance and fear that their homeland was being usurped by force in what they called a sham vote.
KYIV, Ukraine -- A Kremlin-orchestrated referendum got underway Friday in occupied regions of Ukraine that sought to make them part of Russia, with some officials carrying ballots to apartment blocks accompanied by gun-toting police. Kyiv and the West condemned it as a rigged election whose result was preordained by Moscow.
KYIV, Ukraine — Against a backdrop of war and repression, Moscow and its proxies on Friday began holding what they called referendums in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, condemned by much of the world as a mockery of voting intended to justify Russia’s annexation of those ravaged lands.
Moscow says the referendums are legal.
The referendums, which are illegal under international law and dismissed as "a sham" by Western governments and Kyiv, could pave the way for Russian annexation of the areas, allowing Moscow to frame the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive as an attack on Russia itself.
“There is no referendum. There is a propaganda exercise which is being called a referendum,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior aide to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “It means nothing. It will be a few staged things where there will be Russian television cameras.”
Russia has little history of holding free and fair elections, with ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, outright fraud, and media manipulation common practices. It held a similar illegal vote in 2014 after occupying Ukraine's Crimea region. Very few countries have accepted the results of the vote.
