Many residents are said to have participated in regional and local elections in four occupied Ukrainian regions. According to the first official Russian figures, President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party has won.
Voting took place not only in the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, but also in some Russian regions such as the capital Moscow. Incumbent Sergei Sobyanin leads there. The mayor received more than two million votes in the online vote, according to a senior official of the city government. Communist leader Andrei Zyuganov’s grandson, Leonid Zyuganov, came second in electronic voting, but by a significant margin (about 200,000 votes in total).
Moscow’s mayoral election was one of several gubernatorial elections the Kremlin held in the middle of the war as a voting test before next year’s presidential election. In total, just over seven million people were eligible to vote in the capital. They could vote both online and with ballot papers. Sobyanin thanked his election staff for their lively participation. He called for a demonstration of unity.
Emphasize the claim to power
The elections in the occupied territories were mainly about underscoring their own claim to power. The Russian government declared the Ukrainian territories annexed in September 2022 after so-called referenda, but only controls parts of them militarily. The elections also ended in Ukraine on Sunday. According to official figures, Putin’s United Russia party won.
The Ukrainian government and its Western allies had previously denounced the elections as illegitimate and did not recognize the results. The Austrian government condemned the referendums last year.
Source: Krone
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