According to complaints, the “spontaneous” referendums involved armed men going door-to-door to collect votes for annexation.
Vladimir Putin will hold a ratification ceremony on Friday for the annexation of four Ukrainian regions after self-proclaimed referendums condemned by Ukraine and the West as a fraud.
The so-called votes were held in Luhansk and Donetsk in the east and Zaporizhia and Kherson in the south.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Vladimir Putin will attend an annexation ratification ceremony at the Kremlin in which the territories will be formally annexed to Russia. “A signing ceremony of the agreements for the inclusion of the new regions in the Russian Federation will take place tomorrow at 15:00 (local and Greek time) in the Kremlin,” Peskov said.
“Vladimir Putin will deliver an important speech during the ceremony,” the Russian official added, noting that Putin will then meet with Moscow-appointed heads of four Ukrainian regions.
Russian officials said on Wednesday that the self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk and the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhia had all voted to join Russia.
They claimed that 93% of votes in Zaporizhia were in favor of annexation, as were 87% of ballots in Kherson, 98% in Luhansk and 99% in Donetsk.
According to complaints, the “spontaneous” referendums involved armed men going door-to-door to collect votes for annexation.
The leaders of Ukraine’s four separatist regions, which are under Russian control, are already in Moscow.
The officials, who have been appointed by Moscow to the regions of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, as well as Zaporizhia and Kherson, southern Ukraine, arrived by air in Moscow yesterday, Wednesday evening, according to Russian news agencies.
“I am in Moscow,” the Russian-appointed head of the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, Leonid Pashechnik, announced today to the Russian news agency TASS.
“Of course, a meeting with the president is planned. I can’t say where, what kind, when. I do not have this information,” the official of the Russian occupation administration of Kherson Kirill Stremusov said today.
An indication of the Kremlin’s intention to mark the occasion are the celebrations, which are also scheduled to take place tomorrow, Friday, in Moscow, with the municipal authorities of the Russian capital announcing the closure of streets in the city center, mainly around the iconic Red Square Square, where the platform stood.
After a referendum on the annexation of Crimea, a peninsula in the southern part of Ukraine, in 2014, Putin gave a speech to ask Russian parliamentarians to ratify the annexation of the territory to Russia.
The international community has never recognized Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
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