Pro-Russian officials holding illegal referendums in occupied Ukrainian territories plan to encourage “minors” to vote to give the appearance of increased participation, Ukraine’s security service said.
Starting Friday and lasting until early next week, Moscow-backed separatists in four occupied regions in eastern and southern Ukraine — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia — are holding referendums on joining Russia.
In eastern Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk region, pro-Russian officials plan to include teenagers aged 13 to 17 in the “fake referendum” voting process, Ukraine’s security service — or SBU — said in a statement Thursday. Citing intercepted documents, the SBU said “minors” would be accompanied by parents, guardians or representatives of orphanages to polling stations.
The SBU said doing so would allow Russian proxies to build a more widespread voter base and “enhance control” of referendum turnout.
“At the expense of secondary ‘voters’, the occupiers are trying to artificially increase the catastrophic lack of ‘votes’ to legitimize the fake [referendum]”, the SBU said, adding that Russian proxies are planning to implicate families who registered to vote in Donetsk but now live in Russia so they can “falsify the results”.
As voting began Friday, Russian soldiers and their proxies stood guard around poll workers as Ukrainians voted and even showed up at people’s homes, according to a New York Times report. A CNN report said some residents ignored the call to vote, while others were forced to vote.
Ukrainian and Western officials have widely denounced the referendums as illegal and said the results of any votes would never be recognized.
“The mock referendums have no legitimacy and do not change the nature of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. This is a further escalation in Putin’s war,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said earlier this week.
During a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, President Joe Biden said the “sham referendum to try to annex parts of Ukraine” was a “very significant violation of the UN Charter.”
Britain’s Ministry of Defense shared in an intelligence briefing that the votes were “likely driven by fears of an imminent Ukrainian attack and expectations of greater security after officially becoming part of Russia.”
The announcement of the referendums earlier this week came after several weeks of Ukrainian advances along the war’s eastern and southern fronts, including a punitive counteroffensive in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, where the eastern European country liberated thousands of square miles of previously Russian-held territory. .
In response to the battlefield setbacks, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday announced the partial military mobilization of his country’s reserves — a move that Western officials and war researchers said would likely have little tangible impact on the seven-month-old conflict. months .
