The vast majority of participants in Conducting illegal referendums in the territories controlled by Russia In eastern and southern Ukraine they voted for annexation – an outcome that Kyiv has condemned but which Russian President Vladimir Putin may formalize in the coming days.
Andrei Torchak, Secretary General of the United Russia Kremlin, who oversaw the vote in Donbass said.
The voting process, which lasted five days for security reasons, took place without a ceasefire, and fighting continued between the Ukrainian army, Russian forces and allied separatist militias.
Ukraine, which considers “sham” elections in the eastern regions of Donetsk, Lugansk and southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhya, warned that citizens who participated in the organization of referendums would be accused of treason.
Western powers, which have already announced that they will not recognize the results, threatened the Kremlin with a new round of sanctions, as happened with the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.
According to the first results of the poll, more than 98% of voters supported the incorporation of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics into the Russian Federation.
said Leonid Bashnik, leader of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic.
About 92.74% of voters in the Zaporizhia region, which is flooded by the Sea of Azov, supported the Russian annexation, according to a tally of more than 92% of the vote. In the case of Kherson, on the border with Crimea, after 75% of the votes were counted, more than 86% voted yes.
The referendum was also held on Russian soil, where ballot boxes were set up so that refugees (or deportees, depending on how) could exercise the right to vote.
“It must be understood that Western countries will never, under any circumstances, recognize the results of these consultations, regardless of whether we are here and are monitoring their situation,” said Maxim Grigoriev, head of the Coordination Council of the Russian Public Chamber of Voting Control.
Today’s elections, the last day of the referendum, began with the sound of the Russian anthem at the electoral colleges, while the Russian flag could be seen in public.
The separatists highlighted that the voter turnout exceeded all expectations, despite Kyiv’s denunciations of coercion of the region’s population, manipulation of the census, and persecution of believers by the central government.
In the case of the Donetsk region, the Ukrainians living in the part controlled by the Ukrainian forces, i.e. 45% of the territory, did not vote. So did a small strip in Kherson and about a third of Zaporizhzhya.
Moscow and Russia’s supporters accused Kyiv of trying to sabotage the referendum by firing dozens of projectiles into the occupied territories, forcing the vote to be postponed and causing the closure of some electoral colleges in Lugansk.
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Once the vote was over, the separatist leaders said they were ready to travel to Moscow, meet with Putin and begin the legal “establishment” process. And Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was convinced that the process “will be very fast”, since both the deputies and the executive branch are “ready”.
The British Ministry of Defense said on Tuesday that Putin may complete the annexation next Friday (30), but Senate President Valentina Matvienko hinted that Moscow is not in a hurry.
“I think that between tomorrow and the next day, in the next few days, the results of the referendum will be ready. We are ready now. I don’t see the need to hold extraordinary meetings. The meeting is scheduled for October,” he added. 4″, he announced.
She added, in any case, “We will respect the will of the residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, the Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions. If their will will be part of Russia, we will support it.”
In the case of Crimea, a referendum was held on March 16, 2014, and two days later Putin announced its annexation, which was formalized on March 21, during an official ceremony in the Kremlin with the leaders of the peninsula and the port of Sevastopol. .
After the controversial referendum, Crimea officially declared its independence, which lasted 30 hours, a declaration that the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya separatists rejected as unnecessary.
In this regard, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba stressed that the separatist referendums “will not have an impact” on the military objectives of Kiev, which will continue the campaign to evacuate the national territory.
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