A service member of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic walks with his rifle after voting during a referendum on joining LPR to Russia, at a military facility in Luhansk, Ukraine, Sept. 23, 2022.ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/Reuters
Residents in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine are being forced to vote in referendums on whether their home regions should become part of Russia, local officials say, setting the stage for Moscow to annex Ukrainian territory.
The votes began Friday in the southern and eastern Ukrainian provinces of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk, and will continue until Tuesday. Ukrainian officials say residents in those regions are being made to cast their ballots in front of armed soldiers.
Oleksandr Starukh, the Ukrainian Governor of Zaporizhzhia, wrote on the online messaging service Telegram that residents are not voting freely. “It is not difficult to understand what mark people will put under the muzzles of automatic weapons,” he said. He added that the results of the pseudo-referendums are predetermined, and that Russia will announce fake vote totals for the Kremlin to use in further manipulations.
Yaroslav Yanushevich, the Ukrainian head of Kherson’s military administration, said on Telegram that Russian soldiers and collaborators are going to residents’ houses with assault rifles and pressing them to participate in the referendums. He said those who speak out or refuse to vote are told they have 24 hours to leave.
He added that Kherson residents who received Russian passports after the invasion of Ukraine are being served with mobilization summonses, raising concern about the prospect of Russia trying to draft Ukrainian men into its war effort.
The Kremlin called the referendums soon after the Ukrainian army liberated villages and towns in the Kharkiv region, in a lightning advance. When the votes conclude, it is widely anticipated that Moscow will annex the regions, which could have dangerous repercussions. Russia has indicated it would defend any newly annexed land as its own, potentially by using nuclear weapons. And it announced last week that it planned to call up 300,000 reservists, its first such mobilization since World War II.
Russian state news agencies are reporting that President Vladimir Putin may deliver an address about the referendums to Russia’s Federal Assembly on September 30.
Mr. Putin suggested last week that he would consider using nuclear weapons against Ukraine. He said in a televised address that Russia would “make use of all weapons systems available” to defend its territory. “This is not a bluff,” he added.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently said something similar. During a news conference following a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he said the regions where votes are under way will be under Moscow’s “full protection” if they are annexed by Russia.
When asked if Russia would have grounds for using nuclear weapons to defend the regions, Mr. Lavrov said Russian territory, including territory “further enshrined” in Russia’s constitution in the future, “is under the full protection of the state.”
“All of the laws, doctrines, concepts and strategies of the Russian Federation apply to all of its territory,” he said.
The possible Russian annexations raise the risk of a direct military confrontation between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose member countries are already supplying arms to the Ukrainian army.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram that his country would regain all the territory Russia has taken since 2014, when Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula. “We will definitely liberate our entire country – from Kherson to the Luhansk region, from Crimea to the Donetsk region,” he said.
Meanwhile, voting in the four occupied regions continues.
Serhiy Haidai, the Ukrainian Governor of Luhansk, said during an interview on Ukrainian television that the referendums do not resemble a traditional voting process. He called the vote in his region an “absolutely fake referendum.”
Oleg Nikolenko, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, wrote on Twitter on Saturday that Ukraine has requested “an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council on Russia’s sham referendums in the occupied territories of Ukraine.”
“Russia must be held accountable for its further attempts to change Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders in a violation of the UN charter,” he added.
Western officials have said they will ignore the results of the referendums.
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly said in a statement last week that Canada “strongly condemns the sham referendums planned in occupied regions of Ukraine.”
“These phony exercises with predetermined results will have zero legitimacy, and Canada will not recognize them. Borders will not change. Ukraine’s territory will remain Ukraine’s.”
On Saturday, possibly in reaction to Russia’s losses in Kharkiv, the country’s defence ministry announced a change in leadership. It said its deputy minister in charge of logistics, General Dmitry Bulgakov, had been replaced with Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev, a long-time army official whom the EU has called the “butcher of Mariupol” for his role in orchestrating a deadly siege of the Ukrainian port city early in the war.
Michael Bociurkiw, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Atlantic Council, a think tank, said what happens next is “very crucial.”
Mr. Putin, he said, “will say that any attack on these territories is an attack on the Russian Federation, we reserve the means to retaliate by any means possible. Of course this will be widely condemned by the international community. But I think it should be seen as a huge red line.”
He said rhetoric at the UN General Assembly in New York won’t change Mr. Putin’s course of action. “He responds to strength.”
With a report from Reuters.