Cover image: A woman votes during the referendum on Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territories, at a mobile office in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, September 23, 2022. AP
- Russia began voting on Friday in its “referendums” to annex Ukrainian regions that it wholly or partly controls. Hundreds of polling stations were to be opened in the four territories – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia – and others in Russia to get displaced people to vote. In Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities, the authorities organized demonstrations in support of the votes with a lot of flags and slogans.
- The polls were denounced by kyiv and its Western allies. “The world will react with the greatest accuracy to pseudo-referendums” and they “will be unequivocally condemned”assured the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. US President Joe Biden has warned Russia that the United States will ” work with [leurs] allies and partners to inflict swift and severe additional economic measures on Russia” if it annexes territories in Ukraine. The G7 countries have called “all countries to unequivocally reject these fictitious referendums”of the “simulacra” who “have neither legal effect nor legitimacy”.
- In parallel, the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Russian reservists continues in Russiathe Kremlin seeking the parade with the advances of the Ukrainian army, which, strong of the deliveries of Western weapons, claimed new territorial progress Friday.
- On the ground, Ukraine claimed on Friday the taking of Iatskivka, in the Donetsk region (east). She also says she advanced south of Bakhmout, eastern locality that the Russian army has been trying to take for months without success. According to Volodymyr Zelensky, environ 9 000 km2 of territory and 400 municipalities have been reconquered in the east of the country by the Ukrainian army since the launch of the military counter-offensive in kyiv.
- The announcement of the mobilization prompted many Russians to leave the country, causing an influx at the borders, without it being possible to quantify the extent of the phenomenon. Finland has decided to take measures to limit “significantly” the entry of Russian citizens on its soilwhile the Baltic countries and Poland have already been drastically curbing entries for weeks.
- Ukraine also announced that it had exhumed 447 bodies from a mass burial site in Iziuma city recaptured from the Russians in the North-East, including thirty with “signs of torture”such as tied hands, broken limbs or “amputated genitalia”.
- On the side of the United Nations (UN), a commission of inquiry has recognized that “War crimes have been committed in Ukraine”evoking in particular Russian bombardments on civilian areas, executions, acts of torture, ill-treatment, as well as sexual violence.
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