A few kilometers from the front line, a new sign was recently placed on the large billboard of an occupied city in Ukraine’s Luhansk region.

“Vote for our president. Together we are strong,” said a resident of Anastasiia on the sign in the white, blue and red colors of the Russian flag.

The message was clear to her: that the President was Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, not Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and that Mr. Putin was the only choice in the Russian presidential elections that have taken place in the occupied parts of Ukraine over the past three years. took place. to soften.

Mr. Putin long ago turned Russia’s elections into a predictable ritual designed to convey legitimacy to his rule. In the occupied territories, this practice has the additional purpose of presenting the occupation as a fait accompli and identifying dissenters, according to political analysts and Ukrainian officials.

“Elections in these regions confirm the idea that they have the same laws and procedures as the rest of the country,” said Ilya Grashchenkov, a Russian political scientist who is advising a long-running candidate running against Putin. The result, he said, is that they become woven into the fabric of the Russian state.

For many in the occupied territories, the election ritual takes place under the watchful eye of armed soldiers.

Wearing face coverings, the soldiers have escorted poll workers door to door through the occupied parts of the four Ukrainian regions that Russia annexed after invading the country two years ago, according to local residents, statements by Russian officials and videos on social media. media.

Occupation officials say the show of force is necessary to protect those collecting votes.

The pollsters are calling for votes that would give Putin, who has no serious challenger on the ballot, his fifth term as president and another six years in office.

Ukrainian officials, Western allies and rights groups have called the election an illegal sham. They say the vote is marred by widespread intimidation and coercion and is part of a broader campaign of repression against residents of the occupied territories.

“They promote it even though it is not a real election,” said Anastasiia, a resident of the Luhansk region. “Everyone knows who is going to win.”

Anastasiia, 19, left the occupied territories earlier this month to build her life outside the war zone. Fearing retaliation, she asked to be identified only by her first name and to omit the name of her city to protect relatives left behind.

Few if any countries are expected to recognize election results in the occupied territories, including the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed in 2014 after earlier Russian aggression in southeastern Ukraine. The United Nations considers the entire territory to be part of Ukraine.

Analysts say the coercion, numerous electoral machinations and the exodus of pro-Ukrainian residents mean that Putin will almost certainly have an even bigger landslide in the occupied territories than in the rest of Russia.

For the Kremlin, it is the electoral process itself, and not the margin of victory, that furthers its cause.

Holding elections, however orchestrated and unfair, in the occupied territories allows Putin to strengthen his claim. It also allows him to portray himself as a champion of democracy and draw contrast with Ukraine, which suspended its presidential elections this year because of the war, said Mr. Grashchenkov, the political analyst.

Russia has already held two previous elections in the four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine that it has partially occupied since invading the country. The Kremlin claimed that 99 percent of residents of Donetsk, the most populous of the occupied regions, opted to join Russia in 2022. Putin’s party candidates won a landslide victory in local elections in the occupied territories last year.

Ukraine and Western countries have called these elections a sham.

Beyond such voices, Russia has eradicated Ukrainian identity and language with Russian curricula in schools, requiring Russian passports for work and cracking down on people with pro-Ukrainian political views.

Russia’s attempts to simulate a normal electoral process often collide with the realities of war, sometimes in farcical ways.

For starters, Russia does not have full control over the regions where it claims to vote. And just months after the country held a sham referendum to declare the city of Kherson part of Russia, its forces were forced to surrender the city to the Ukrainian army. (Russia continues to maintain control over the southern part of Kherson province).

A similar dissonance emerged as this month’s presidential election approached.

For example, little is known about how many voters there are. The constant shifting of the front lines, the flight of local residents and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and workers have dramatically changed the demography of the occupied territories. The full effect of this transformation remains largely unknown due to strict Russian censorship and ongoing fighting.

But the few available estimates indicate a drastic decline in the occupied population. Figures from Russia’s election commission show that the occupied Kherson region, for example, lost 13 percent of its registered voters, or 75,000 adults, in the last three months of last year.

In total, Russia’s election body claims that the four Ukrainian regions annexed in 2022 have 4.5 million voters. This would represent a 33 percent drop from the last voter list published by the Ukrainian government before the large-scale invasion. Ukrainian officials say the actual number today is likely even lower.

The picture is further complicated by the Russian government’s decision to allow hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed in the occupied territories to vote there. Russian propaganda videos published on social media have shown election workers dodging grenades and diving into ditches to deliver ballot boxes to stoic soldiers in the trenches.

Russian authorities have not published the locations of polling stations or the names of members of local electoral commissions. It has also used the system to the state’s advantage.

Occupation officials have labeled the occupied territories as “remote,” a label previously reserved for places like the reindeer herding communities of the Arctic. This allowed Russia to extend the voting period there by three weeks, making the process even more difficult to monitor. Polling stations in two of the occupied regions, Zaporizhia and Donetsk, opened on February 25 and will close in March. Voting ends in Russia on December 17.

The “remote” designation has also given pro-Russian election officials the ability to go door to door soliciting votes from residents of the occupied territories. And because voting takes place there under martial law, these officials are accompanied by armed soldiers.

“Dear voters, we care about your safety!” the electoral commission for occupied Zaporizhia said wrote in one Telegram message earlier this month, where camouflaged voters with blurred faces cast their votes. “You don’t have to go anywhere to vote – we will come to your home with the ballots and ballot boxes.”

The Russian Election Commission claimed there were almost 1.4 million votes was released in remote areas on March 11. In the last Russian presidential election in 2018, remote areas in the far north and east of Russia accounted for just 180,000 votes.

Ukrainian officials say this rise is being achieved through intimidation.

“Voting is taking place at gunpoint,” Dmytro Lubinets, the human rights ombudsman in the Ukrainian parliament, said in a statement this month. “Participating in such ‘elections’ is a matter of survival.”

The actual wishes of the majority of residents are indecipherable. No independent opinion polls have been published in the occupied territories since the invasion. And the exodus of pro-Ukrainian residents means that many of those who remain often support the occupation, or at least have resigned themselves to it.

Russian officials have justified extraordinary voting procedures in the occupied territories as a security necessity. Ukrainian forces and partisans have regularly targeted Russian collaborators and occupation officials, including electoral workers.

Most recently, a deputy mayor of Berdiansk, on the coast of the Azov Sea, was killed in a car explosion on March 6. Ukraine’s military intelligence took responsibilitysays the official, Svetlana Samoilenko, was killed for forcing residents “to participate in illegal, fake voting.”

Ukrainian officials say Russia also uses elections to identify residents unhappy with the regime. The government in Kiev says Ukrainians are routinely jailed, tortured or summarily executed by invading forces as part of a campaign of forced “Russification” of the occupied territories.

“If you vote, you are loyal to Russia and you have opportunities,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, a Kyiv-based political analyst. “If not, you are under pressure. You are being investigated.”

Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from London.

A Ukrainian attack struck a Russian warship moored in Crimea early Tuesday, in what appeared to be one of the most significant attacks on Moscow’s prized Black Sea Fleet in months.

The Ukrainian Air Force said this a statement that it had destroyed the Novocherkassk, a large landing ship, in the southeastern Crimean port of Feodosia during the night. The Russian Ministry of Defense said this the state news agency Tass that the ship was damaged in an attack using “aircraft-guided missiles,” but did not say whether the ship was permanently disabled.

Videos of the attack which appeared to have been captured by local residents and released by the Ukrainian Air Force, showed a massive explosion that caused a large fireball, followed by a giant cloud of smoke and fire billowing into the night sky. The images could not immediately be verified, but Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-installed governor of Crimea, said the attack had caused a fire in Feodosia. One person was killed and two others were injured in the attack, he added.

“The fleet in Russia is getting smaller!” Mykola Oleshchuk, the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, wrote in one post on the Telegram messaging app celebrating the strike, which he noted came afterward Ukrainian missiles sank the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet last year.

The Ukrainian military has long maintained that the war cannot be won without targeting Russian assets and operations in Crimea Moscow was illegally annexed in 2014.

Ukraine has done just that in recent months greatly accelerated the pace of attacks on the peninsulawhich the Russian military uses as a logistics hub for its hold on southern Ukraine – storing fuel, ammunition and other supplies to be funneled to the battlefields – as well as as a launching pad for attacks on Ukraine.

The Black Sea Fleet has been used to launch devastating precision cruise missile attacks deep into Ukraine. In an effort to reduce the threat, the Ukrainian military has done just that this year they repeatedly targeted the fleet – claims in September to killed his commander.

Those attacks were important achievements for a country without its own warships and rare successes in a year marked by disappointing attempts to break Russian defense lines on the battlefield.

Ukraine’s air force said it used cruise missiles in Tuesday’s attack, which took place around 2:30 a.m. local time. Russian news media reported that the 110-meter-long Novocherkassk was capable of carrying up to 10 tanks and 340 troops.

The Ukrainian military said it suspected the ship was carrying Iranian-made attack drones for use in the war. Natalia Humeniuk, spokeswoman for the Ukrainian army in the south, told national television that “it is clear that such a large explosion was not caused only by fuel or ammunition from the ship itself.”

Andrii Klymenko, the head of the Institute for Strategic Studies of the Black Sea, agreed. “Judging from the video of the explosion, which was very powerful, it carried explosives: grenades or rockets, or, as some people say, drones,” he wrote in a text message.

Ukrainian military authorities said partisans bombed a Russian military headquarters in the occupied city of Melitopol, killing three officers, the latest in a series of attacks aimed at weakening Russia’s grip on the territory it controls, even as Ukraine’s counteroffensive Kiev has effectively come to a standstill.

Ukraine’s defense intelligence unit described the attack, which took place on Saturday, as an act of revenge and said the explosion killed at least three Russian National Guard officers. The Russian Defense Ministry has not commented on the event, and it was not possible to independently verify it because it took place behind Russian lines.

“The strike caused panic in Melitopol as many Russian proxy police officers rushed to the scene with their sirens,” the intelligence unit said on the messaging app Telegram on Sunday. “A while later they towed a car that had burned out near the headquarters through the occupied city to their station.”

Melitopol, in southern Ukraine near the Sea of ​​Azov, was captured by Russia early in the war and remains a center for Russian forces and pro-Moscow authorities seeking to assert their control and promote Russian culture and identity . As such, it is also a hotbed of attempted sabotage and assassinations by anti-Russian partisans hoping to disrupt the Kremlin’s control.

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, partisan activity has been a hallmark of Ukraine’s military action in the area occupied by Moscow, which represents about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. That included a series of attacks on Ukrainian politicians who have cooperated with Russian authorities.

These attacks appear to have increased in intensity in recent weeks, in combination with missile and drone attacks on Russian military infrastructure.

Late last month, Russian officials reported that Oleh Tsarov, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament who had supported Moscow’s invasion last year, had been shot in Yalta, a city in the occupied region of Crimea. The Ukrainian security service said it had tried to kill him. Mr Tsarov later posted a video on social media showing he had survived.

In addition, Mychailo Filiponenko, the former head of a pro-Russian militia in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk region, died in an assassination attempt last week when his car was blown up, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

“Ukraine appears to be intensifying attacks on Russian military, logistical and other high-profile assets in the rear areas of occupied Ukraine and Russia,” the Institute for the Study of War, a research group based in Washington, reported on Sunday.

The killings come as the counter-offensive launched by the Kiev government in June has largely stalled, having failed to achieve its core goals. Ukraine has failed to achieve a decisive breach of Russian defenses in the Zaporizhia region in the south of the country, or to regain substantial territory in the east.

Military analysts say progress will be more difficult in the coming weeks because the rainy weather makes it harder to use mechanized military transport and because the Ukrainian army will have to rest and rotate its troops.

The northern West Bank was once seen by Israeli, Palestinian and international authorities as a sort of pilot program for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory, and by some even as a potential prototype for a future Palestinian state.

But a sharp escalation of violence in the region in recent days involving Palestinian militants, Israeli security forces and extremist Jewish settlers underscores the failure of that vision.

The northern West Bank is witnessing an explosive mix of the rise of local armed Palestinian militias carrying out shooting attacks on Israelis; almost daily raids by the Israeli army to arrest militants, often fatal; and reprisals by extremist Jewish settlers, who have swept through Palestinian villages and set fire to property.

The coalition government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — which includes far-right, ultra-nationalist parties that reject all talks with Palestinian leaders — has escalated tensions and pushed for a more aggressive military response to attacks. The government is also pushing for the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which is seen by most countries as an obstacle to resolving the conflict and as a violation of international law.

The volatile mix has resulted in one of the deadliest years for Palestinians in the West Bank in more than a decade. Of the 140 Palestinian deaths in the area so far this year, about 86 have occurred in the northern West Bank, mostly in the Jenin and Nablus areas. Most were killed in armed clashes during military raids, although some were innocent bystanders.

“In recent months, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on a new guise,” Yohanan Tzofeff, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, wrote Thursday. “The attacks in the West Bank and attempts to escalate the situation have increased.”

This week’s violence began with a deadly Israeli raid on Monday in the northern West Bank town of Jenin. It led to an hours-long firefight that killed seven Palestinians, including a 15-year-old girl, according to Palestinian health officials. For the first time since the early 2000s, Israeli helicopter gunships were sent into the area to secure troops attempting to free wounded soldiers and armored vehicles disabled by a powerful roadside bomb.

A day later, Palestinian gunmen killed four Israeli civilians, including a 17-year-old boy, near the Jewish settlement of Eli. The Palestinian gunmen were members of the armed wing of Hamas, the militant Islamist group that took control of the coastal area of ​​Gaza in 2007 after winning elections the year before.

And then, late on Wednesday, an Israeli airstrike by an unmanned drone killed three Palestinian militants in a car that the military said had just fired on an Israeli position in the northern West Bank and carried out attacks on Jewish settlements in the area.

The killing of the four Israelis near Eli sparked a wave of retaliation Tuesday and Wednesday by Israeli extremists who swept through Palestinian towns and villages, including Turmus Aya, north of Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, which covers most Palestinian towns and villages. controls. in the West Bank. Turmus Aya is a relatively affluent community and many of the residents are also US citizens.

The Israeli arsonists set fire to 15 houses and 60 vehicles and crops, Lafi Deeb, the head of the Turmus Aya council, told Palestinian radio on Thursday. A Palestinian man from the town was fatally shot by an Israeli officer during the fight, according to officials.

Mr Deeb said his town, which did not have its own fire trucks, had to wait for one to arrive from Bir Zeit, about half an hour away.

When Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh later visited the city, he was confronted by a resident who yelled at him and demanded that the authority “do more to protect its people,” The Associated Press reported.

Mr Netanyahu called the settler attacks unacceptable and said: “The State of Israel is a state of law. The citizens of Israel are all obliged to respect the law.”

The Israeli army condemned the settlers’ violence, saying security forces entered the city to put out the fires, prevent clashes and collect evidence, and that Israeli police were investigating the event.

But Israeli forces, despite their overall control of the area and a spate of similarly destructive reprisals against settlers in February, seem powerless to prevent it.

While violence in the northern West Bank has escalated in recent months, the situation has been deteriorating for years, with waves of violence rising and ebbing since the collapse of peace talks nearly a decade ago.

Hoping to reduce friction in the area and signal progress toward a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel dismantled four Jewish settlements around Jenin in 2005 and also withdrew from the Palestinian coastal enclave of the Gaza Strip.

Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War and has said its future will be decided in negotiations, but the last formal round of US-brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace talks ended in 2014.

The Palestinian Authority, the interim body established in the mid-1990s as part of the Oslo peace process, would exercise limited self-government in parts of the occupied West Bank, with security forces numbering about 60,000. But it is absent from the hotbeds of Palestinian militants in the northern part of the area, such as Jenin and Nablus, and it seems, experts say, responsibility has almost been abdicated.

“It’s a turnaround and a collapse,” said Zakaria al-Qaq, a Palestinian national security expert. Instead of less involvement, he said, “there is total involvement between Israel and the small Palestinian factions, and the Palestinian Authority is out of the game, in the margins, or not there at all.”

“We’re back to square one,” he added. “There is no Oslo. There is nothing.”

Israeli hardliners, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, have called for a wide-ranging Israeli military operation in the West Bank modeled on Israel’s 2002 invasion of Palestinian cities. the height of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, when suicide bombers attacked Israeli cities.

But many Israeli security experts say the circumstances don’t warrant a major operation.

“In 2002, we had 130 deaths a month,” Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Mr. Netanyahu and now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a conservative-minded research group, said of the Israeli victims of the intifada. So far this year, 29 Israelis have been killed by Arab attackers.

“There are many weapons in the area, the Palestinian Authority is not functioning and we have to solve it alone,” said Mr. Amidror. “But it’s not the same situation,” he added, pointing out that the current armed Palestinian militias in the West Bank were mostly local gangs operating without organizational infrastructure.

Instead, the Israeli government is not only turning more aggressively against the militias, but is also focusing on the expansion of the settlements.

Immediately after the attack in Eli, Mr. Netanyahu announced plans to build 1,000 settler homes there. In addition, Israeli authorities are expected to put forward plans for an additional 4,000 homes in the settlements at a planning meeting next week.

On Sunday, the government eased the process for approving new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and handed oversight from Defense Minister, currently Yoav Gallant, to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right former settlement activist who favors Israeli annexation. of the West Bank.

And in March, Israel’s parliament repealed legislation that excluded settlers from the four Jewish communities in the occupied West Bank evacuated in 2005, allowing visits there, though the government would still have to approve any reconstruction in the areas.

Myra Noveck And Hiba Yazbek reporting contributed.

Two Palestinian gunmen shot dead four Israeli civilians outside a Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Tuesday afternoon, the Israeli army said, in the deadliest attack on Israelis since January.

The shootings took place at a restaurant and gas station next to the settlement of Eli, about 40 kilometers north of Jerusalem, a video showed. An Israeli civilian shot and killed one of the attackers, a Palestinian from a nearby Arab town, and a second attacker was later shot in his getaway vehicle after a manhunt, security officials said.

Hamas, the Islamist militia and political movement that controls the Gaza Strip, said the attackers were members of its armed wing and described the violence as a response to recent Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, police raids on a mosque in Jerusalem and military raids on Gaza . the northern West Bank.

Recently, Hamas has often avoided direct acknowledgment of any involvement in violence in the West Bank. The decision to claim responsibility this time raised the possibility of Israeli retaliation against Hamas leaders and infrastructure in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement: “Our armed forces are now working on the ground to settle accounts with the killers. We have already proven in recent months that we deal with all killers without exception. Those who attacked us are either in the grave or in prison, and so it will be here.”

The attack also renewed calls within Netanyahu’s governing coalition — the most nationalist and socially conservative in Israeli history — for even stronger action in the area.

Israeli forces are already conducting daily raids on Palestinian towns in the West Bank, experts say the most protracted military operation there since the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in the 2000s. One such raid on Monday sparked an unusually lengthy firefight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants in another part of the northern West Bank, killing six Palestinians and causing rare damage to Israeli military vehicles.

That brought the death toll for Palestinians this year to more than 160. Most of them were killed in the West Bank during Israeli military raids — one of the highest death rates in the past 15 years.

But some right-wing lawmakers in Israel say the military still needs to do more to counter a wave of Arab violence that killed at least 29 Israelis by 2023, most of them in attacks by Palestinians.

Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It has since occupied the area and built hundreds of Jewish settlements that most countries consider to be illegal under international law, but which settlers view as legitimate reclamation of land that was ruled by Jews in ancient times.

The declining likelihood of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the entrenchment of Israel’s control over the territory, and a weakening of mainstream Palestinian leadership there have all contributed to an increase in Palestinian militancy. Much of it is driven by a new generation of small armed groups frustrated with the status quo.

The Israeli government announced last week that it would approve settlement construction in the West Bank more quickly and easily, and is expected to make plans next week for more than 4,000 new settlement housing units in the territory.

The shooting took place on Tuesday on the main road in the West Bank, around a gas station mainly used by Israeli settlers but easily accessible to Palestinians. The site was previously attacked in 2015.

The Israeli army said in a statement that the gunmen first shot three civilians at a restaurant near the entrance to Eli, before killing another person at the nearby gas station and wounding several others. One of the attackers was then shot by a passerby and the second drove north for about 25 miles before being intercepted and shot by a group of Israeli security agents.

Eli was founded in 1984 on hundreds of acres of land claimed by nearby Palestinian villages, but which Israeli officials said had no private owners. Now home to about 4,600 Israelis, it houses an academy that prepares religious Israelis for military service and whose founders are known for their ultra-conservative views.

Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Iyad Abuheweila from Gaza City.

Even as Ukraine continues a counter-offensive to recapture the Russian-occupied land, Moscow intends to continue efforts to strengthen its political control over Ukraine’s four occupied territories, which were illegally annexed last year, through regional to schedule elections on September 10. This is reported by the Russian news agency Tass.

Russia’s Central Election Commission has announced that the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south will hold elections for legislative assemblies and municipal representative bodies, according to a post on the Telegram messaging app.

“For the first time, our new regions are holding elections together with the whole country,” Ella Pamfilova, the chair of the committee, told Tass.

The frontline of the war stretches for 600 miles which cut across the four regions, while the Ukrainian counter-offensive was underway in both the east and south.

How legitimate the elections will be is an open question, given the general lack of civil liberties in occupied territories. Russia held referenda last September in the four regions considered illegal by most of the world. After five days of staged votingin which many residents said they were forced to vote by armed soldiers, the Russian plenipotentiary officials announced alleged results that, as expected, showed overwhelming support for joining Russia.

Soon after, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia signed decrees and held elaborate ceremonies to officially declare the regions part of Russia as the United States and the European Union denounced the moves and imposed tougher sanctions.

Andrew E. Kramer reporting contributed.