Russia starts vote "on accession" in four Ukrainian regions

Russia launched referendums in four occupied areas of Ukraine on September 23 expected to be used by Moscow to justify annexation, but Kyiv said the voting was mandatory with residents being threatened with punishment if they did not take part.

The votes on whether the regions should become part of Russia began after Ukraine recaptured large swathes of territory earlier this month in a counter-offensive. Russia's seven-month war has killed tens of thousands, uprooted millions and pummelled the global economy, Reuters reports.

With Russian President Vladimir Putin also announcing this week a military draft to enlist 300,000 troops to fight in Ukraine, the Kremlin appears to be trying to regain the upper hand in the grinding conflict.

And by incorporating the four areas into Russia, Moscow could portray attacks to retake them as an attack on Russia itself, a warning to Kyiv and Western supporters.

Putin on September 21 said Russia would "use all the means at our disposal" to protect itself, an apparent reference to nuclear weapons. "This is not a bluff," he said.

The referendums had been discussed for months by Moscow-installed authorities in the four regions but Ukraine's recent victories prompted a scramble to schedule them.

Voting in the provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya, representing about 15 per cent of Ukrainian territory, is due to run from September 23 to September 27.

"Voting has started in the referendum on the Zaporizhzhya region becoming a part of Russia as a constituent entity of the Russian Federation! We are coming home! Godspeed, friends!" said Vladimir Rogov, an official in the Russian-backed administration of that southern region of Ukraine.

The West has widely condemned the referendums as illegitimate and a precursor to illegal annexation. There will be no independent observers, and much of the pre-war population has fled.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which monitors elections, said the outcomes would have no legal bearing as they do not conform with Ukraine law or international standards and the areas are not secure.

Reports of coercion, panic

Serhiy Gaidai, Ukraine's Luhansk region governor, said that in the Russian-held town of Bilovodsk, a company director told employees that voting was compulsory and anyone refusing to take part would be fired and their names given to security services.

He said that in the town of Starobilsk, Russian authorities banned the population from leaving the city until September 27 and armed groups had been sent to search homes and coerce people to get out to take part in the referendum.

"The mood of the Russians is panicky because they were not ready to carry out so quickly this so-called referendum, there is no support, there are not enough people," Yuriy Sobolevsky, the displaced Ukrainian first deputy chairman of the Kherson regional council, said on messaging app Telegram.

"Today, the best thing for the people of Kherson would be not to open their doors."

Russia argues that the referendums offer an opportunity for people in the region to express their views.

"From the very start of the operation... we said that the peoples of the respective territories should decide their fate, and the whole current situation confirms that they want to be masters of their fate," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this week.

Ukraine says Russia intends to frame the referendum results as a sign of popular support, and then use them as a pretext for annexation, similar to its takeover of Ukraine's Crimea in 2014, which the international community has not recognised.

Justifying self-defence

Hinting at the Kremlin's strategic calculation in staging the referendums, ex-president Dmitriy Medvedev, now deputy head of its national security council, warned Moscow would henceforth deem any attack on the four territories as one on Russia itself.

"Encroachment onto Russian territory is a crime which allows you to use all the forces of self–defence," Medvedev said in a Telegram post on September 22, adding that any weapons in Moscow's arsenal, including strategic nuclear weapons, could be used.

Referendum results overwhelmingly in favour of Russia are considered inevitable, as in Crimea in 2014.

The plebiscites have been denounced as an illegal farce by world leaders including US President Joe Biden, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and French President Emmanuel Macron, as well as NATO, the European Union and the OSCE.

Russia already considers Luhansk and Donetsk, which make up the Donbas region Moscow-backed proxies partially occupied in 2014, to be independent states.

Russia does not fully control any of the four regions, with only around 60 per cent of the Donetsk region in Russian hands.

Ukraine has said the referendums are a sign Russia is running scared. "Any decision that the Russian leadership may take changes nothing for Ukraine," Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said on September 22.

Despite the plan to mobilise reservists, Putin maintains Russia is only carrying out a "special military operation" to demilitarise Ukraine, rid it of dangerous nationalists and defend Russia from NATO.

Kyiv and the West call Russia's actions an unprovoked, imperialist bid to reconquer a country that shook off Russian domination with the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union.

Russian statistics about referendums

Meanwhile, the Russian TASS news agency reports that "due to ongoing Ukrainian shelling attacks, a significant number of Donbas, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson residents were forced to flee their homes. They will have an opportunity to cast their ballot outside those territories, including in Russia".

As many as 450 polling stations will be set up across Donetsk and another 200 will be established for people evacuated to Russia. Luhansk residents will be able to cast their ballots at 461 polling stations, as well as in all Russian regions, where a total of 201 polling stations have been created.

The Zaporizhzhya region's "authorities" announced the establishment of 394 polling stations across the region and another 58 in Russia, Luhansk, Donetsk and Kherson.

The Kherson region's residents will have the opportunity to vote in Crimea and a number of Russian cities, including Moscow, apart from their home region, where eight territorial and 198 district election commissions have been created.

Kherson's central election commission expects about 750,000 people to take part in the vote. The Zaporizhzhya region has around 750,000 registered voters. Donetsk has printed about 1.5 million ballots for its residents, the report says.

"All four regions declared their commitment to maximum transparency and legitimacy, being open to monitoring by international observers," TASS adds.

According to a phone survey conducted by the Institute of Social Marketing (INSOMAR) on September 19 among 4,000 respondents, around 80 per cent of Zaporizhzhya and Kherson region residents, 90 per cent of Luhansk residents and 91 per cent of Donetsk residents "support accession to Russia", the Russian news agency reports.