[Jan van den Berghe]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door E. Gidius

Niemand in de hele wereld gelooft dat, zelfs de Poetintrollen niet. De realiteit is dat Rusland de stemmen van die mensen stal en deed ze zeggen wat het imperialistische Rusland wilde.

Inderdaad, het was opgezet spel, een pure schijnvertoning.

The Russians could not ensure the smooth functioning of polling stations during the sham vote in those areas covered by the military and covert activities of the Ukrainian forces. The pseudo-referendums could be held in the larger towns (such as Kherson, Berdiansk and Melitopol), although even there the use of mobile ballot boxes was preferred. Multiple ballots were cast by the same people, and others were forced to vote on behalf of absentees. The fraudulent character of the ‘plebiscite’ is also confirmed by the fact that the organisers had no voter registers prepared, nor data on how many inhabitants remained in the temporarily occupied territories. The occupation authorities declared the ‘referendums’ to be valid as early as the second day, as allegedly more than 50% of those ‘eligible’ had participated. They also maintained that the majority of voters were in favour of joining Russia, and that the results were a foregone conclusion. Several incidents of sabotage by Ukrainians (explosions near facilities controlled by the occupiers) were reported.

The pseudo-referendums on annexation were a complete sham, and had the character of a political demonstration supervised by Russian security forces. The voting process itself was organised to ensure preconceived ‘results’ that bore no relation to reality or the mood of the local population, which has been terrorised by the occupying forces. The ‘referendums’ were made into a propaganda spectacle to convince the Russian public that the inhabitants of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine ‘genuinely wished to be incorporated into Russia’, and that the ‘special military operation’ had been launched by Moscow for humanitarian reasons, and had ended in success.

https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje...endums-ukraine