Russia prepares to annex Ukrainian regions as staged votes end

Russia is set to formally annex occupied territories in Ukraine after staging referendums that involved coercion, threats and, in some places, soldiers going door to door and forcing people to vote at gunpoint.

Families in Russian-annexed Crimea on Tuesday farewell reservists called up by Vladimir Putin’s partial mobilisation after his reversals in Ukraine. Picture: AFP

Russia is set to formally annex occupied territories in Ukraine after staging referendums that involved coercion, threats and, in some places, soldiers going door to door and forcing people to vote at gunpoint.

Kyiv and Western governments have described the votes as a sham designed to confer a veneer of legitimacy to Moscow’s seizure of Ukrainian land seven months on from its invasion. They could also enable Moscow to claim that any effort by Ukrainian forces to recapture the territories, in the south and east of the country, amounts to an attack on Russia itself.

Residents in the occupied areas said Russian soldiers compelled them to vote, guns drawn, in a choreographed show of support for Moscow’s plan to make their regions part of Russia. They said some Russian sympathisers were brought in from other regions to cast their votes at polling places to create the impression that it was a regular vote.

“This referendum, they’re doing it in their Russian style, just for pictures,” said Serhiy Ivaschenko, the head of a district in the city of Kherson, the only regional capital Moscow has seized since the full-scale invasion began this year. He has been going back and forth between Kherson and Ukrainian territory, leaving the city just before the staged voting began, but remains in touch with many people who are still there. He estimated that around 30pc of Kherson’s pre-war population remains in the city.

Konstantin Ivashchenko, former CEO of the Azovmash plant and appointed pro-Russian mayor of Mariupol, visits a polling station as people vote in a referendum in Mariupol.

“The Russians knock on doors,” Mr Ivaschenko said. “It’s usually two women with a ballot box. And of course two soldiers with guns. But they don’t have the resources to knock on all the doors.”

Voting in Russian-controlled parts of four regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — began on September 23 and ended Tuesday afternoon, local time. As was widely expected, the official results claimed to show overwhelming support in the occupied territories for joining Russia, opening the way for Russian President Vladimir Putin to announce their annexation on Friday, when he is scheduled to address Russia’s parliament, the UK’s Ministry of Defence said.

According to official results, 93pc of voters in Russian-controlled parts of the Zaporizhzhia region checked the box in favour of joining Russia; in Luhansk, it was 91pc in favour; in Kherson, it was 87pc in favour. A comparable figure was expected in Donetsk.

In a similar exercise, held in Crimea after Moscow seized the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, 97pc voted in favour of joining Russia, according to official results.

The upper house of Russia’s parliament will consider formally annexing the provinces next Tuesday, according to Russian state media.

A man glues a referendum poster in Berdyansk.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US would never recognise the annexation of Ukrainian territory by Moscow and that Washington would impose “additional severe and swift costs on Russia”, adding that Kyiv “has the absolute right to defend itself throughout its territory, including to take back the territory that has been illegally seized one way or another by Russia”.

“Because there is no change at all in the territory that is being annexed by the Russians — as a matter for us, or for the Ukrainians — the Ukrainians will continue to do what they need to do to get back the land that has been taken from them,” Mr Blinken told reporters in Washington on Tuesday.

“We will continue to support them in that.”

The British defence ministry said, “Russia’s leaders almost certainly hope that any accession announcement will be seen as a vindication of the ‘special military operation’ and will consolidate patriotic support for the conflict.”

In Beryslav, a village in the southern Kherson region, one resident said soldiers had been going door to door with guns, forcing people to vote — in some cases in favour of joining Russia.

A woman casts her ballot for a referendum at a hospital in Berdyansk.

“I personally saw a man voting at the gate as two men in civilian clothes stood over him.”

Most people don’t answer when the Russian officials knock on their doors, she said.

“They came to us and knocked on the gate. We didn’t come out, though we could see through the windows.”

One resident of Kherson city, whose husband works at a hospital, said Russians came to the hospital on Monday in an effort to organise doctors to vote. The hospital director refused, and told the Russians that it would prompt the doctors who remained at the hospital to leave, she said; in response, the Russians took the director away. One older woman and two soldiers also pressured patients at the hospital to vote, she said.

Arrangements were also made for some of the estimated 2.6 million Ukrainians who have fled to Russia since the start of the war to vote. Some are Russian sympathisers, while for others leaving Ukraine was the only way to escape the fighting.

Election commission members count votes of refugees from Russian-held regions of Ukraine for a referendum at a polling station in Simferopol, Crimea, on September 27.

Russian state television has portrayed the vote as a success, showing interviews with residents of the occupied regions saying how relieved they are that they will soon be part of Russia.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “The Russian legal system and the executive branch are ready for the possible admission of new constituent entities to Russia following the referendums in the respective territories.”

By annexing the regions — and thereby calling them part of Russia — Mr Putin hopes to deter Western countries from sending more military aid to Kyiv at a time when Russia has been dealt some of its heaviest setbacks of the war. Ukraine has reclaimed around 9065sq km of territory this month after a flash offensive that exposed some of the frailties of the Russian army.

Long-range rocket systems supplied by the US have played a key role in turning the momentum in the conflict in Ukraine’s favour.

Now residents of Kherson say they fear that when the voting is over, men will begin to get called up to the Russian army following Mr Putin’s mobilisation order to raise more troops last week.

Mr Ivaschenko said it was becoming harder to leave.

“I’ve received many more requests from people asking, ‘How can we leave the city?’” he said.

“Even people who wanted to stay up until now want to leave.”

Nikita Nikolaienko, Illia Oliinyk, Ann M. Simmons and William Mauldin contributed to this article.

The Wall Street Journal