By Oyintari Ben
Armed soldiers have reportedly gone door-to-door in Russia’s occupied regions in Ukraine to gather votes for purported “referendums” on joining Russia.
One woman in Enerhodar told news correspondents, “You have to respond verbally and the military marks the response on the sheet and keeps it.”
Russian guardsmen were stationed in southern Kherson in the midst of the city collecting ballots.
According to Russian official media, the door-to-door voting is done for “security.”
Only in-person voting will be allowed on September 27, according to Tass. “Voting will be organized in communities and door-to-door on the other days.”
According to informations gathered by Heritage Times, a Melitopol resident said that two local “collaborators” and two Russian servicemen visited her parents’ apartment to provide a ballot for them to sign.
The woman said, “My dad said ‘no’ [to joining Russia]. “My mother, who was watching, questioned what would happen if she replied “no. They responded, “Nothing.”
Mom is currently concerned that the Russians will persecute them.
The woman added that there was just one ballot for the household as a whole, not one ballot for each voter.
The appearance of armed personnel administering the vote undermines Moscow’s claims that this is a free and fair procedure, notwithstanding the fact that the information is anecdotal.
According to experts, the five-day self-styled referendums will enable Russia to illegitimately claim four of the seized or partially occupied regions of Ukraine as its own.
In other words, seven months after Russia’s invasion, a fraudulent vote on annexation.
Internationally, the “annexation” would not be recognized, but it would cause Russia to claim that its land is being attacked by Western weapons provided to Ukraine, which could intensify the conflict.
The referendums, according to US President Joe Biden, were “a fraud” and a “false pretext” to attempt and conquer regions of Ukraine by force in violation of international law.
The United States will always recognize Ukrainian land as being a part of Ukraine, he declared.
James Cleverly, the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, claimed that the country had proof that Russian authorities had already set goals for “imagined voter turnouts and acceptance rates for these sham referenda.”
By the end of the month, according to Mr. Cleverly, Russia intends to formally annex the four areas of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.
According to a source in Kherson, the only public initiative to promote voting was a notice on a Russian news service letting people know they could cast their ballots in a port building that had been vacant for ten years.
Another woman in Kherson reported seeing “armed militants” outside the structure where it appeared that the poll was being held. She pretended to forget her passport in order to avoid casting a ballot.
The woman claimed that every member of her family and friends opposed the referendum. After this referendum, “We don’t know how our lives will be,” she remarked. It is quite challenging to comprehend what they want.
