Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed to liberate the entire country while Russia presses ahead with its alleged referendum in the occupied territories of Ukraine and so-called electoral officials, accompanied by masked gunmen, knock on doors to get people to vote.
Zelenskyi said Ukrainian forces would throw out Russian forces and take revenge on “any strike by the aggressor.” He promised that Ukrainian forces would regain control of the southern Kherson region and eastern Donbass, which includes Luhansk province and Crimea.
“Every murderer and torturer will be brought to justice for what they did against Ukrainians,” he said.
Reports published on Telegram groups from occupied territories suggest that local people have overwhelmingly boycotted the Kremlin’s referendum stunt that began on Friday. The trial ends on Tuesday, and Vladimir Putin is expected to declare these lands belong to Russia this week.
On Sunday, locals described a chaotic voting process largely staged for Russian state television. In the city of Khakova, officers went from house to house fumbling with intercoms while two soldiers stood nearby with assault rifles. Most residents refused to open their doors.
In the southern coastal village of Stanislav, a resident reportedly walked with two Russian service workers collecting signatures. Some of those who took part in the vote and are smiling for the cameras are Russian citizens who have traveled by bus from Crimea. Some elderly Ukrainians attended, social media reports suggested.
The Ukrainian governor of the Luhansk province, Serhiy Haidai, dismissed the exercise as a farce. He said those who took the poll voted openly. Anyone who ticked the “no” box to union with Russia was noted in a notebook and put on an “unreliable list,” he said. In some cases, armed men smashed down doors.
Haidai said Moscow has inflated turnout in cities now nearly empty because of fighting. These include Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk and Rubizhne, which the Russian army pulverized and then captured over the summer. Turnout was estimated at 41 to 46 percent, he said, even though tens of thousands of people have fled.
The Kremlin had postponed plans for a referendum due to a lack of support, but they were hastily revived last week after a series of backlashes by the Russian military. Earlier this month, Ukrainian forces retook almost all of Kharkiv Oblast and are pushing towards the southern city of Kherson, which has been occupied since March.
On Wednesday, Putin announced a partial mobilization of up to a million soldiers. The announcement sparked protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg and violent clashes with police on Sunday in Dagestan, a multi-ethnic republic in the North Caucasus. The video showed people shooting in the air as the crowd demanded the release of conscripted relatives.
Video sent by a friend at the anti-mobilization protest in Makhachkala, Dagestan. It’s very rare in Russia for protesters to wrestle with the police like this pic.twitter.com/kdBbzxDxfp
— Pjotr Sauer (@PjotrSauer) September 25, 2022
According to OVD-Info, an independent monitoring group, more than 2,000 people have been arrested across Russia for protesting the draft. Many men of military age have entered Georgia or Finland to avoid Russia’s first mobilization since World War II.
Fighting continued in Ukraine. According to Russian media sources, a former Ukrainian MP who collaborated with Moscow, Oleksii Zhuravko, was killed along with another person in Kherson. A rocket attack destroyed a hotel where Zhuravko was holding a meeting, it has been reported. He left Ukraine for Russia in 2015.
The military administration in the Black Sea port of Odessa confirmed Moscow’s use of kamikaze drones supplied by Iran. Serhii Bratchuk, a spokesman for the region, said the city center was hit three times with no casualties. A Russian drone was shot down. Ukraine’s Southern Command claimed to have killed 57 Russian troops and destroyed 30 pieces of equipment.