The United States guaranteed this Thursday that it has information that Russia will “manufacture the results” in the local elections that are being held this week in four Ukrainian regions annexed by Moscow.
“The outcome will obviously be predetermined and highly rigged. This so-called election is an illegitimate sham,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a news conference.
The official added that the United States “has information” about the plans of the government of Vladimir Putin to “manufacture the electoral results” in the occupied territories.
The inhabitants of the areas occupied by the Russian army in the annexed regions of Kherson, Lugansk, Donetsk and Zaporizhia have already begun to go to the polls in the elections to the regional assembly, according to the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Russia.
These are the first Russian municipal and regional elections held in these regions, annexed by Russia in September 2022 after a referendum that neither kyiv nor the international community recognized.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave his go-ahead to the re-election of the interim leaders of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik, respectively, with whom he met in the Kremlin.
He did the same with Yevgeny Balitsky, acting governor of Zaporizhia, currently the scene of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and with the leader of neighboring Kherson, Vladimir Saldo.
The elections, which will take place across Russia on September 10, are taking place in these annexed regions despite the fact that the Russian army controls only two-thirds of Kherson, just over half of Donetsk and cedes territory in Zaporizhia, where Kiev announces almost progress. daily towards the Sea of Azov.
In September 2022, Putin signed the annexation of the four Ukrainian regions in an attempt to establish a land corridor with the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, annexed in 2014, which Kiev is now trying to break as part of the counteroffensive.
The Ukrainian Assembly of Deputies (Rada) passed a motion calling on all world parliaments and governments not to recognize these elections.
Ukrainian parliamentarians accuse Russia of turning its electoral system into a “tool to justify armed aggression against the neighboring country and legitimize the illegal annexation of provisionally occupied territories, as well as to undermine confidence in democratic institutions.”
The spokesman for the European Commission, Peter Stano, has already condemned the holding of elections promoted by Moscow in the occupied territories of Ukraine, considering “another massive violation of international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty.”
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Source: TSF
