Russian President Vladimir Putin lauded recent elections in the declared annexed regions of Ukraine, describing them at a meeting with regional heads as “held openly, fairly and competitively.” The international community has widely dismissed the elections — held across four Russian-occupied areas of eastern and southern Ukraine earlier this month — as a sham.
“Of course, this is a significant event, an important step towards the full entry of new regions into the single legal, state space of our large country,” Putin said Thursday.
According to Putin, the “high turnout” in the elections demonstrated “the growing civic maturity of our society.”
More key context: The elections were another attempt by Moscow to enforce a narrative of Russian legitimacy in the parts of Ukraine it holds – some, but not all of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Luhansk regions – even as Kyiv’s counteroffensive makes some progress toward taking back towns in the south.
Ukraine’s National Resistance Center, an official agency of the government in Kyiv, dismissed the elections as a propaganda exercise. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said they violated Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity,” and the Council of Europe labeled them “a flagrant violation of international law which Russia continues to disregard.”
A Melitopol resident told CNN at the time that she had not seen heavy-handed coercion to force people to take part. “Why? Because they don’t care who votes and how, they have already counted the results,” she said.
Russia held similar sham referendums in the four regions last year, in an attempt to project authority over the parts of Ukraine its troops had captured.
CNN’s Rob Picheta and Yulia Kesaieva contributed reporting to this post.