‘The process will continue’
Russia announces more “referendums”.
09/28/2022, 12:51 AM
The Russian ambassador to the UN Security Council says sham referendums in parts of eastern Ukraine will not be the last. Silinsky describes the votes as a “farce” and declared that the damaged areas would be restored.
According to its ambassador to the United Nations, Russia expects more referendums in Ukraine. “This process will continue if Kyiv does not realize its strategic mistakes and failures and does not let itself be guided by the interests of its own people” and instead blindly implement the will of those who are manipulating it, Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vasily Nepensia said at a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas Greenfield, said she had no doubts that Russia would conduct mock referendums again. After all, Moscow would have done the same in 2014 in Crimea and more recently in eastern Ukraine.
In Ukraine, in the four Russian-occupied regions of Cherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhia, sham referendums for joining Russia were recently voted. The elections, which have been held for a total of five days since last Friday, have not been recognized worldwide because they were conducted in violation of Ukrainian and international laws and without minimum democratic standards. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently described the prospect of annexing the territories as a violation of international law.
Silinsky announces the reoccupation of the territories
Despite the sham referendums conducted by the Russian occupiers, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the restoration of the affected areas of his country. “This farce in the occupied territories cannot even be described as an imitation of referendums,” Zelensky said in his video address on Wednesday evening. “Advance and liberate our country!”
Shortly before that, occupation departments deployed by Moscow in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, as well as in Cherson and Zaporizhia in the south, said people there had voted to join Russia, some with more than 99 percent approval.
Observers noted numerous cases in which Ukrainians residing in the occupied territories were forced to vote. In a next step, the occupation departments officially deployed by Moscow are expected to apply to Kremlin President Vladimir Putin for admission to Russian territory. Before the start of the sham referendums, Putin stressed that the regions would then be under Russia’s nuclear protection.
