Putin escalates war with sham vote plan
VLADIMIR Putin last night moved to annex huge swathes of Ukraine, with his forces staging sham votes on joining Russia.
The measure is seen as a major escalation in hostilities and comes amid claims that the Kremlin is panicking over the speed of a Ukrainian counter-offensive.
Russian-backed officials in areas under Moscow’s control yesterday announced a series of referenda, starting this week, with the goal of becoming recognised parts of ‘the motherland’.
But just as Putin openly challenged the West with his latest move, he then failed to appear for an address to the nation last night, sowing seeds of confusion.
News of the votes came as Moscow for the first time hinted at general mobilisation, allowing the Kremlin to call up all reservists and begin conscription.
Kremlin puppet officials in the eastern Donbas regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south, said they will hold ballots – which are expected to be rigged – from Friday. Yevgeny Balitsky, the
‘This is what the fear of defeat looks like’
Russian-installed governor of Zaporizhzhia told the Rossiya-24 news channel that election officials would go door-to-door with police and ‘invite people to vote’.
The plans announced yesterday, with results due as early as Tuesday, mirror the bogus referenda that Moscow staged to justify seizing Crimea in 2014, a move never recognised by the West.
Russian ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, who sits on Russia’s security council, said the votes would make newly redrawn borders ‘irreversible’.
It would then allow Putin to say ‘Russian’ lands are under attack as Ukraine tries to take back areas it has lost.
‘An encroachment on the territory of Russia is a crime that would warrant any means of self-defence,’ Medvedev warned.
Dr Samuel Ramani, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, said the plan would force ‘a broader escalation of the conflict.’
‘Any Ukrainian attacks on these territories would almost certainly trigger an upgraded Russian response, and could even lead to nuclear sabre-rattling,’ he told the Mail. Fuelling Western fears, Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, the Kremlin-backed media outlet, said the referenda would signal ‘either the eve of our imminent victory, or the eve of nuclear war – I cannot see a third [option]’.
And Russian senator Olga Kovitidi, a member of Putin’s United Russia party, said any Ukrainian attacks on the occupied areas after the announcement of the results ‘should be regarded as open aggression against the civilian population of Russia’.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based thinktank, said the rush to organise the referenda in the occupied territories ‘suggests that Ukraine’s ongoing northern counter-offensive is panicking proxy forces and some Kremlin decision-makers’.
‘Partial annexation at this stage would also place the Kremlin in the strange position of demanding that Ukrainian forces un-occupy “Russian” territory, and the humiliating position of being unable to enforce that demand,’ it said.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak warned Moscow that grabbing as much as 15% of Ukraine would be met with a decisive response on the battlefield.
‘This is what the fear of defeat looks like,’ he said. ‘The enemy is afraid. Ukraine will solve the Russian issue. The threat can be eliminated only by force.’
French president Emmanuel Macron called the referendum plan ‘cynical’ and ‘a parody’. US national security adviser Jake Sullivan added: ‘These are not the actions of a confident country. These are not acts of strength.’
Meanwhile, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed yesterday that Putin wants to end the invasion.