The Kremlin recently held ‘elections’ in the four partially occupied regions of Ukraine – the self-proclaimed ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ (DPR) and ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ (LPR), Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – at the same time that voters were taking part in regional elections in Russia, including Moscow.
The results of the polls, which took place mainly on 10 September, were unsurprising. Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, received 75% to 80% of votes to the legislative assemblies of the four regions, with opposition parties, such as liberal pro-Western party Yabloko, gaining a minimal presence. The results of council elections in 79 city and municipal districts are still being counted, but they are unlikely to bring surprises.
The Kremlin claims that residents of the “new regions” – as the occupied territories are called in Russia – have confirmed “their choice” to become part of the Russian state, but Western governments and international organisations have said they will never recognise the results of an illegal vote that violates international norms.
‘A referendum under martial law’
Right from the start, the messaging from Russia’s Central Election Commission, the government body that oversees elections, has made clear that what matters in the occupied territories is not so much the result as the very act of voting within Russia’s political system.
“In its pure form, this is not an election, but a referendum under martial law. This is how it should be perceived,” Russian political scientist Oleg Bondarenko told Russian newspaper Kommersant in early August. “We vote for Russia, for Putin,” voters joyfully declared in media propaganda stories.
In Russia, regional assemblies have more or less the same powers as they do in Ukraine. But the occupied regions will be subject to a number of formalities necessary to integrate them into the Russian Federation: the adoption of regional ‘constitutions’, charters and rules, the approval of budgets, the formation of executive and judicial power, and so on.
Already in the spring, the Kremlin promised elections would be held for the first time under Russian law (as they have been for nine years in annexed Crimea). But many exceptions to usual voting conditions had to be made.
Russia has been distributing Russian passports to residents of DPR and LPR since 2019. In summer 2022, the ‘passportisation’ process expanded to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Between October 2022 and May 2023 alone, around 1.5 million Russian passports were issued in the four occupied regions, according to a top Russian official.
But there are still more potential voters than passport holders. In Zaporizhzhia, for example, the authorities said that 300,000 passports were issued, but the election commission printed 500,000 ballot papers.
To solve this discrepancy, residents of the occupied regions were allowed to vote using Ukrainian passports, ID cards or even driving licences, provided that they could prove they lived in the area. In Donetsk and Luhansk, residents could present DPR and LPR (rather than Russian) passports, which had been distributed there since 2015, as well as military identity cards of the pro-Russian paramilitaries known as the “People’s Militia”.
The Kremlin persistently calls the entire population of the occupied territories “Russian citizens”. This extends to people evacuated or deported to Russia, who could vote at 329 “extraterritorial polling stations” within Russia.
Even residents of settlements that have been liberated by Ukraine could vote, via the ‘mobile voter’ mechanism that allows voting at any polling station in Russia or occupied Ukrainian territory. This option was aimed primarily at people who fled with the Russian army when areas were liberated. Thus, an election was organised for the Donetsk city of Liman, even though it was liberated by Ukraine last year.
Both the organisers and the voters risked their lives to take part in the elections: over the past month, the polling stations in the occupied regions have regularly come under fire. During the pseudo-referendums in the occupied territories in autumn 2022, the authorities warned that “terrorist attacks” could take place, and Russian security forces detained Ukrainian sabotage groups in almost every city.
A year ago, Ukraine’s security services disavowed these kinds of operations, even in off-the-record conversations, but now they apparently consider elections a legitimate target. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has admitted being behind attacks on polling stations and staff in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
On 31 August, Ukrainian media, citing SBU sources, reported a large number of wounded after a drone raid on a meeting of 30 members of the electoral committee in Kamianka-Dniprovska, a town close to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. In response, the occupation administration asserted that only one guard was injured at the empty children’s cultural centre, but that “80 children could have been present”. Ukrainian drone strikes on polling stations in Skadovsk and Nova Zburivka in Kherson were also allegedly unsuccessful.
Ukraine elections and referendums are a crime
SBU spokesperson Artem Dekhtyarenko, speaking to openDemocracy in early September ahead of the vote, called on Ukrainian citizens in the occupied territories not to “take part in a fake plebiscite and thereby not act in favour of the aggressor”. However, he promised not to punish the mere act of voting, given that armed Russian soldiers insist on it, including by visiting homes and workplaces.
But he said that active participation – such as working in an election commission, being an election observer, or actually standing as a candidate – would be considered a serious crime.
So far, only six people have been accused of this offence. Last week, the SBU accused the head of Kherson’s electoral commission Marina Zakharova, her deputy Sergei Vysotin and secretary Irina Kravchenko of collaboration, promising to imprison them for ten years. The head of Russia’s Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, her deputy Nikolay Bulaev and secretary Natalya Budarina have been threatened with life imprisonment because their actions are interpreted as a violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, though of course it is very unlikely they would be in a position to face action.
By the end of August, the SBU had managed to identify by name more than 3,500 “active participants” in the elections in the four occupied regions. However, judging by published data, up to ten times that many people were actually involved (if not yet named).
For example, in Luhansk region, 5,260 members of territorial and precinct commissions organised the vote. According to the local electoral commission, 336 candidates stood for the legislative assembly of the LPR, and another 3,241 people for 28 municipal councils. Therefore, in one region alone, there are 8,800 “active participants”, not counting election observers.
This means that the illegal elections in the occupied territories are the most widespread crime committed by Russia since the full-scale invasion last year. The SBU’s Dekhtyarenko has promised that his agency will find all accomplices and bring them to justice, at least in absentia.
Actual convictions for illegal voting are rare, however. According to research by Opora, a Ukrainian NGO, only 288 participants in the so-called referendums organised by the Kremlin in Crimea and Donbas in spring 2014 were convicted in the eight years that followed. Most received suspended sentences on minor charges of violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
However, the organisers of Russia’s pseudo-referendums held in 2022 in occupied Ukraine were accused under a new law – on wartime collaboration. That legislation equated illegal voting with serving in the occupation administration, punishable by five to ten years in prison.
Eleven months later, fewer than 80 verdicts – all guilty – have been issued against Russian vote organisers, according to Ukraine’s court register. That’s a tenth of all the verdicts so far on collaboration offences. Almost half of the defendants were sentenced in absentia. (In wartime, cases of collaboration can be tried without the accused present; in such cases, the courts impose a maximum penalty of ten years in prison plus confiscation of property.)
Those who have appeared in court in person have largely been residents of the western bank of Kherson region, which was liberated a month after the illegal referendums. Since then, about 20 members of the electoral commissions, mostly pensioners from villages in the north-west of the region, have admitted their guilt and received a minimum – but still severe – sentence of five years in prison.
Last year’s referendums were organised hastily, and the electoral commissions contained far fewer people than in this month’s elections. This year, the commissions decided not to publish the names of their employees unnecessarily – for their own safety. But they couldn’t contend with local underground activists and open-source analysts.
The Yellow Ribbon resistance movement, which is active in occupied Kherson, responded in a high-tech way: it invited opponents of the occupation to send photographs of commission members to a chatbot, promising to identify them using artificial intelligence. Even before the voting was over, this data had been transferred to the SBU.
Power doesn’t change hands
The incognito nature of the organisers was far from the most absurd thing about the recent elections: even the candidates were a secret.
In early August, it was decided that the lists of candidates for regional and municipal deputies would not be published, for safety reasons. Instead, the electoral commissions in each of the four regions promised that it would be possible to study the lists at polling stations on voting day. In fact, they asked “citizens of new regions” to vote at random, in effect – because only the first three candidates from each party were listed on the ballot papers. The other candidates were not named on the ballot.
As Russia’s Central Election Commission reassured people of “competition” in the elections, 600 people decided to fight for the 100 seats in the regional Duma of the Donetsk region, 336 in the Luhansk region, 220 in the Zaporizhzhia region, and 191 in the Kherson region. About 9,000 other candidates ran for lower-level council posts.
In fact, the full lists of candidates could be unearthed in the depths of the Central Election Commission’s website. Taking a closer look at them, it becomes clear that no surprises should have been expected from this supposed “democratic competition”; the voting, for the most part, only legitimised the current power holders in the all-Russian system of political power.
A Russian poll in August predicted that, depending on the region, between 68% and 89% of votes would go to the United Russia party. Other parliamentary parties did not agree, of course. Sergei Obukhov, a top official in the Russian Communist Party – which, according to the survey results, teetered on the verge of the entry minimum of 5% of the vote – said that the elections do “not concern real political sentiments”.
While other parties claimed they had “hundreds of thousands” of supporters in the occupied territories, in practice, they did not campaign at all. The so-called “Donbas consensus” played a role here: an agreement not to criticise the war in Ukraine and the Russian government’s work in the occupied territories. In fact, party offices in the occupied regions were mainly engaged in humanitarian and legal assistance while promoting a happy future with Russia. Nobody really intended to change the make-up of the occupation authorities.
United Russia is recognised in occupied Ukraine simply because it is Putin’s party. “They came to Kherson in the spring of 2022, set up a tent, and began distributing Russian SIM cards,” recalls Yuriy Sobolevsky, head of the Servant of the People faction in the regional council in the unoccupied part of Kherson, who spent the first months of the war under occupation.
While the political future is clear in Donetsk and Luhansk – which have held two “elections” in the past nine years – it remains to be seen how occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia will fare. Donetsk and Luhansk have their own local elites who help make up the numbers politically, with hospital heads, theatre directors and local trade union officials as MPs.
But there is a shortage of such personnel in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. To fill the candidate lists, officials from Crimea and Russia have been brought in, whether a top manager from the Russian state nuclear company, a Kremlin official or a Russian MP themselves. Some Russian candidates were also brought into Donetsk and Luhansk, including kickboxer Vladimir Mineev and a deputy from Rostov-on-Don city council, but at a lesser scale.
For cities in Donetsk and Luhansk, these Russian elections were the first local elections in 13 years, after the separatist leadership suspended their self-government in 2015. But three years ago in Mariupol and Lysychansk, in the Kherson region and Zaporizhzhia, between ten and 12 candidates were vying for each seat on the local council. Deputies also had much broader powers. According to Russian legislation, residents do not even have the right to elect city mayors. Instead, the “councils” will have to appoint “city managers”. The switch from Ukraine’s local democracy to Russian occupation, however temporary, will see the same kind of hollowed-out local government that has been created in Putin’s Russia.
