Russia has declared victory in hastily organized sham “referendums” in four occupied regions of Ukraine that saw residents literally forced to vote under the barrel of a gun. Russian state news agency RIA Novosti announced the risible results, which supposedly saw 98 percent of Luhansk residents in favor of aligning with Moscow, 93 percent of those in Zaporizhzhia, and 87 percent of those in Kherson. Residents in Donetsk were said to have been 99 percent in favor of breaking away from Kyiv. Although the referendums were conducted over five days with voting stations and election officials, the result was never in any doubt, with Russian soldiers going from house to house to make certain that locals would vote. Ukrainian officials immediately dismissed the credibility of any vote being conducted at gunpoint, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday evening saying: “This farce in the occupied territories cannot even be called an imitation of a referendum.” Serhiy Haidai, the Ukrainian governor of Luhansk, noted on Telegram that Russian proxy leaders there claimed more people voted than actually live in the region. Fears have been growing that Russian President Vladimir Putin will annex the territories in order to use Ukrainian attempts to recapture the land as a pretext to escalate the war, arguing that such counter-offensives would constitute an attack on Russia itself.
