The Ukrainian leadership’s hopes of a successful counteroffensive have been accompanied by serious thought on how to eventually reintegrate those areas currently under occupation, plus fierce debate on how to treat Ukrainians who became Russian nationals and where to draw the line between collaborator and victim of occupation. In Kyiv, Moscow’s rush to “passportize” occupied parts of Ukraine is a source of concern.
The September elections will test the success of this administrative assimilation-and the loyalty of Russia’s new citizens. In April, he made it legal from next year to deport Ukrainians who refuse Russian citizenship. In March, President Vladimir Putin simplified the procedure for renouncing Ukrainian citizenship. Meanwhile, locals are under increasing pressure to acquire Russian citizenship. Right now, in occupied parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, electoral commissions are being Russified, to the extent that half their members were directly appointed by the Central Election Commission this past February. Russian passport holders in the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics” (LNR and DNR) had already voted electronically in the 2021 State Duma elections as constituents from Russia’s Rostov region. In late 2022, the Russian Central Election Commission set about integrating the electoral authorities of Russia’s “new regions,” training their staff, and rolling out an electronic voting system already in place in Russia proper. The reasons are many, starting with the need to prove that it meant what it said when it declared that it was “here forever.” By restoring some “normalcy” in the area, Moscow also seeks to normalize the conflict to show how little the war is affecting its territorial acquisitions and to demonstrate that it doesn’t matter that Russia only has full control of the Luhansk region, while the other territories are only partially under its control. It would have been easy enough to indefinitely postpone elections in the occupied territories, citing the state of martial law, but the Kremlin is determined to proceed. On the other, it is meant to project confidence to Russians and signal that the war is going according to plan. On the one hand, the vote is calculated to boost loyalty to Russia among locals and force them to participate in political life according to the laws of the occupier. Amid the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the Kremlin is seeking to shore up its position in occupied parts of Ukraine: not only militarily, but also politically, by preparing to hold elections there in September.
0 kommentar(er)
