A prelude to a farce: Prearranged ballots for Kremlin-backed breakaway regions
Eastern Ukraine’s unrecognized Kremlin-backed separatist republics say they will stage a vote to elect their leaders and legislatures on November 2 in a move that has been condemned by Ukraine and the international community as illegitimate.
Tomorrow’s playact, observers note, invokes recent memories of the sham referendum in Crimea that Russia forcibly held under the barrels of guns and tanks in March that was supposed to legitimize the peninsula’s annexation in contravention of international law and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
Critics have described the preposterous attempt at holding anything remotely resembling a popular vote in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) as a farce.
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(Photo: Anastasia Vlasova)
