Moscow cites sabotage attempts at polls in occupied Ukraine

Elections part of balloting held across Russia

Russian authorities on Sunday reported multiple attempts to sabotage voting in local elections taking place in occupied areas of Ukraine.

Polls have now closed after local elections were held over the weekend in 79 regions of Russia, with ballots for governors, regional legislatures, city and municipal councils, as well as in the four Ukrainian regions Moscow annexed illegally last year — the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia provinces — and on the Crimean Peninsula, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014.

Balloting in the occupied areas of Ukraine has been denounced by Kyiv and the West as a sham and a violation of international law.

Russian electoral officials on Sunday reported attempts to sabotage voting in the occupied regions, where guerrilla forces loyal to Kyiv had previously killed pro-Moscow officials, blown up bridges, and helped the Ukrainian military by identifying key targets.

A drone strike destroyed one polling station in the Zaporizhzhia province hours before it opened on Sunday, deputy chairman of Russia’s Central Election Commission Nikolai Bulaev told reporters. He said no staff were at the station at the time of the attack.

Ella Pamfilova, who heads Russia's Central Election Commission, called the incident “a terrorist act" while speaking to reporters that same day, alleging that a Western-supplied drone was used but giving no evidence.

A Russian-appointed official in the neighboring Kherson region said that a live grenade was discovered on Saturday near a polling station there. According to Marina Zakharova, the grenade was hidden in bushes outside the station, and voting had to be halted while emergency services disposed of it.

Denis Pushilin, the acting head of the Russian-occupied parts of the Donetsk region, also said in a statement Sunday that polling station staff there had been “wounded and injured," without giving details.

Moscow has partially occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia since early in the war, while parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions were overrun by Russian-backed separatists in 2014. Ukrainian forces have since retaken Kherson's namesake local capital, and are pressing a counteroffensive in Zaporizhzhia that has been making slow progress.

Local residents and Ukrainian activists have alleged that Russian poll workers make house calls accompanied by armed soldiers in both provinces, detaining those who refuse to vote and pressuring them into writing “explanatory statements” that could be used as grounds for a criminal case.

In Russia itself, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin’s seat is up for grabs, although he is running for reelection again and is unlikely to lose a race in which all contenders come from Kremlin-backed parties. Sobyanin was appointed mayor in 2010 and has since won mayoral elections twice: in 2013, despite now-imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny running against him, and in 2018. Candidates for governor in 20 Russian regions are also vying for office this year.

In 16 Russian regions, voters are casting ballots for local legislatures. There are also multiple votes for city and municipal councils across the country and races for a few vacant seats in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament.

In the majority of the Russian regions and in the occupied regions of Ukraine, polls opened on Friday, and the voting lasts for three days, concluding Sunday. In other regions, voters can only cast their ballot on Sunday.

In over 20 Russian regions, including Moscow, online voting has been enacted, despite wide criticism by opposition figures who say it lacks transparency and could easily be rigged. It has also been made available in Crimea.

Pamfilova, the head of Russia’s Central Election Commission, said in a separate statement Sunday that more than 3 million Russians in 25 regions have voted online.