Zelenskiy vows to defend Ukrainians in occupied regions as ‘referendum’ results announced

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy says Ukraine will “defend” its citizens in Russian-occupied regions, as Moscow stands poised to formally annex them following so-called referendums that have already been denounced by the west.

“This farce in the occupied territory cannot even be called an imitation of referendums,” Zelenskiy said on Tuesday in a video posted on Telegram.

“We will act to protect our people: both in the Kherson region, in the Zaporizhzhia region, in the Donbas, in the currently occupied areas of the Kharkiv region, and in the Crimea.”

Western officials have said Russia is using the referendum and the threat of nuclear weapons to dissuade continued support for Ukraine but it said it would not work.

The US has said it will continue to support Ukraine’s attempt to retake the occupied territories which Russia plans to annex next week. The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said late on Tuesday that Washington would propose a UN security council resolution to condemn Russia’s “sham” vote. The resolution would also urge member states not to recognise any altered status of Ukraine and demand that Russia withdraws its troops from its neighbour, she tweeted.

Once annexed, Russia’s leadership has said it will consider attacks on the Russian-controlled areas a direct attack on Russia.

In a speech announcing the referendums, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, threatened to respond with nuclear weapons if Russia’s national security was threatened.

The four-day-long fake referendum in the Russian-occupied regions concluded on Tuesday and as predicted, the results reported by Russian state media showed overwhelming support for joining Russia.

“Ukraine has the absolute right to defend itself throughout its territory, including to take back the territory that has been illegally seized in one way or another by Russia,” US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said at a press conference with India’s external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. “The weapons that we have been providing them have been very effective in enabling them to do just that.”

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, also weighed on Wednesday calling the ballots “illegal” and describing the results as “falsified.”

Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president from 2008 to 2012 and now deputy chair of the Russian security council, warned on Telegram that “encroachment on to Russian territory is a crime which allows you to use all the forces of self-defence … This is why these referendums are so feared in Kyiv and the west.”

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The Kremlin-installed leaders of the occupation quickly appealed to Putin with a request to annex their territories. Denis Pushilin, the head of the Russian proxy Donetsk People’s Republic, said that he would travel to Moscow to prepare for a formal annexation. Occupation officials installed in Luhansk and Kherson also made public appeals to the Russian president. In his appeal, Volodymyr Saldo, head of the puppet government in Kherson, said that the region sought to become an “indelible” part of Russia. He was also filmed receiving a Russian passport on Wednesday.

The UK has already sanctioned 33 people involved in organising the so-called referendum and the EU’s foreign affairs representative Borrell has said the EU plans to follow suit.

Blinken said the US will impose additional sanctions if Russia follows through with its annexation plans. He said Russia was engaged in a “diabolical scheme” whereby Russia had moved the local population out, some of whom had since disappeared.

“Then they bus Russians in, they install puppet governments and then they engage in the referendum and manipulate in any event the outcome to then claim the territory belongs to Russia through annexation,” said Blinken.

The exiled Luhansk governor, Serhiy Haidai, wrote on Telegram that voting numbers claimed by the occupied authorities matched the same number of people who had the right to vote in 2012 – before the mass displacement of people from the region following the 2014 war and the full-scale invasion of 2022.

“Let’s take into account the hundreds of thousands of evacuees and immigrants,” said Haidai.

The purported percentage of ballots opting to join Russia ranged from 87% to 99.2% in the four regions of Ukraine that Russia occupies. Russia controls almost all of Kherson and Luhansk region, but only parts of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

The total area set to become de facto part of Russia amounts to around 15% of Ukraine and includes around 4 million people.

Russian state media initially reported that the official annexation would be announced by Vladimir Putin at a scheduled address on Friday but it now looks likely to be next4 Octobe. Putin said on Tuesday that Russia wanted to “save people” in the territories.

Announcements that top occupation officials would travel to Moscow on Wednesday indicated that a formal annexation could be declared as early as the end of the week. Russian media have also reported that companies are requiring employees to attend a pro-war concert scheduled on Friday meant to celebrate the “referendums” held on the new territories.

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The UN said it was committed to Ukraine’s territorial integrity within recognised borders.

Earlier, in an address to the UN security council, Zelenskiy warned that Ukraine would not be able to negotiate with Russia after the votes.

“Russia’s recognition of the pseudo-referendums as ‘normal’, implementation of the so-called Crimean scenario, and yet another attempt to annex Ukrainian territory means that there is nothing to talk about,” he said in a video message.

“In front of the eyes of the whole world, Russia is conducting an outright farce called a ‘referendum’ on the occupied territory of Ukraine,” he said.

“People are forced to fill out some papers for a TV picture under the muzzles of machine-guns. The figures of the alleged results of the pseudo-referendum were drawn in advance.”

With Agence France-Presse