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With Russia’s annexation of the 4 eastern regions of Ukraine, the old argument about collective self defence became out of date, the argument became that these regions are part of Russia, and that Ukraine trying to retake them is an attack on Russia’s territory. And if we were to accept the referendums that led to the annexations, that would be perfectly true, these regions would be Russian and Russia would only be acting in rational self defence. After all, if there’s a foreign army occupying your land, it’s only right to kick them out, isn’t it?
That means we have to talk about these referendums, obviously it goes without saying that they’re not legal under Ukrainian law, but most countries don’t gain their independence legally, independence is something you usually have to fight for in one way or another. So the important question is, do these referendums reflect what the people of those 4 regions wanted? If we take the results at face value Russia had an overwhelming mandate to annex the regions, as the great majority of people wanted it to happen, but that’s a big if.
The main issue with these referendums is that only 1 of the 5 days they ran for involved in person voting polling stations like a normal referendum, you might think that this isn’t necessarily a problem and it isn’t, there are other ways to vote in an election, some people prefer to vote by mail, some countries even allow for online voting in some circumstances.
But for 4 out of 5 days of the referendum, the voting looked more like this.
Rather than people going out to vote or mailing their vote in, Pro-Russian officials went to local communities door to door accompanied by soldiers or police with the ballots, according to some reports these officials didn’t even hand the ballots out to the voters, instead they would have people “vote verbally” and mark the papers for them.
With this in mind we can start to understand the stunning results of over 99% in favour of joining Russia at their highest and 87% at their lowest, with turnouts of over 75% in all regions, when the ballot comes to you rather than you going to it it’s hard not to turn out, and when you’re thinking of how to vote, your ballot being collected by officials accompanied by soldiers and police who you know all favour one side in the referendum could be a deciding factor, to put it mildly.
This is already enough to make these referendums suspect, but we also have to remember that portions of the regions being balloted weren’t even under Russian or seperatist control; In fact, in Zaporizhzhia region the namesake and capital of the region, Zaporizhzhia city, was under Ukrainian control during the referendum.
So given that these regions were annexed through referendums where half the population didn’t vote and the other half voted under the watchful eye of occupying soldiers or police, it’s safe to say you would have to be an expert athlete in mental gymnastics to believe this could be taken as a real expression of a population’s will.
Of course in spite of all this the gymnasts are out there, going out to argue for these factors as necessary for “security reasons”, but I would suggest that if you need to make all of these compromises just to run a vote, your vote doesn’t have much value to begin with, we got what can only be described as an electoral comedy act.
They’re there for protection obviously. This is in Zaporozhye, half the territory is occupied by Ukrainian forces.
— @bc1qa (@4E93C4B107FEA2) September 24, 2022
And internationally these referendums were not taken seriously either, with the UN Security Council voting to condemn Russia’s annexations in a resolution that only one country voted against, Russia itself. The rest of the UN followed suit a week later by voting on the same resolution, 143 countries supporting it, 5 against, 35 abstentions.