In occupied Ukraine, a vote is cast (for Putin) while armed soldiers watch

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.