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Vote On Joining Russia In Occupied Parts Of Ukraine Enters Last Day [1]
['Rfe Rl']
Date: 2022-09
The last of the five days of so-called referendums on joining the Russian Federation is taking place in four Ukrainian regions partially occupied by Moscow -- votes dismissed as a sham by Ukraine, the West, and the United Nations because they are illegal under international law.
The vote in Russian-controlled areas of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhya regions being held in the midst of the largest conflict in Europe since the end of World War II takes place amid claims by some local officials that voters have been threatened and intimidated.
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Kyiv and its allies have denounced the votes as a "sham" and that they would never recognize the results of balloting that runs counter to the UN Charter and international law.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on September 27 urged the European Union to impose further economic sanctions on Russia to punish it for the votes and said the moves by Moscow would not change Ukraine's actions on the battlefield.
Kuleba, speaking after talks in Kyiv with French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, said that personal sanctions would not suffice as a punishment for the referendums, which Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 27 claimed were meant to "save people" in those regions.
Members of the United Nations Security Council will hold a meeting on September 27 on the referendums.
U.S. President Joe Biden said the polls were a "sham" and nothing but a "false pretext to try to annex parts of Ukraine by force."
Moscow-installed leaders in the regions where the voting is taking place have said provisional results could be expected in the evening of September 27 or in the days that follow.
Russian lawmakers would then vote to formally annex the four territories, which would need Putin's signature to be enacted.
Election officials brought ballot boxes house-to-house, in many cases accompanied by armed Russian troops. Officials said that actual polling stations would only be open on September 27 because of security concerns.
Voting was also being held in Russia because thousands of residents of the areas that are controlled by Russian forces in Ukraine fled after the war started.
According to data from election commissions quoted by TASS, 98 percent of the votes cast in Russia favor the Donetsk and Luhansk regions joining Russia. The election commission said about 60 percent of the votes cast by people from the two regions had been counted.
Russian troops have suffered serious setbacks in the conflict this month, both in the east and south of Ukraine, which observers say pushed President Vladimir Putin to rush ahead with the vote to cement Moscow's authority there.
The British Ministry of Defense said on September 27 that Putin is likely to announce the accession of the occupied regions of Ukraine to the Russian Federation during an address to parliament on September 30.
"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," the ministry said in its daily intelligence bulletin.
Observers view the outcome of the ballot as a foregone conclusion that follows the same pattern that Moscow applied in 2014 to annex the Crimea region from Ukraine in the wake of huge pro-Western street demonstrations that saw the country's Kremlin-friendly president ousted.
Putin also announced that Moscow was calling up 300,000 reservists, a move that has triggered protests and saw thousands of able Russian men fearing deployment to Ukraine flee to neighboring countries.
The British government on September 26 placed sanctions on 92 Russian individuals and entities for their various roles in the voting.
"Sham referendums held at the barrel of a gun cannot be free or fair and we will never recognize their results," Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said in a statement.
With reporting by AFP, AP, Reuters, and dpa
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[1] Url:
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-russia-voting-annexation/32053737.html
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