DISINFO: Referendums are a response to Zelenskyy's call for Russians to get out of Ukraine
SUMMARY
Referendums in Donbas, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions are a response to Zelenskyy's call for Russians to get out of Ukraine. What has been happening in Ukraine since 2014 is impunity. [Ukraine] finally turned into a totalitarian state of the Nazi persuasion. The Russian Federation has a lot of evidence of the criminal actions of the Ukrainian military.
RESPONSE
The referenda in Ukrainian regions will have no international legal force and have already been condemned in the strongest terms by world leaders including EU High Representative Josep Borrell. Тhis is not the free will of the people, but part of the aggressive annexation policy of Russia. Soldiers were going door-to-door in occupied parts of the country to collect votes for self-styled "referendums" on joining Russia, according to the BBC report.
The European Union strongly condemns these planned illegal “referenda” which go against the legal and democratically elected Ukrainian authorities, are in violation of Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and in blatant breach of international law. The results of such actions will be null and void and would not be recognised by the EU and its Member States. The intention to annex territories occupied by force since February 2022 and to hold sham referenda will not change their legal status. They are and they will remain internationally recognised as an integral part of Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden described the referendums as "a sham", saying they were a "false pretext" to try to annex parts of Ukraine by force in violation of international law.
The disinformation claim is connected also with an earlier statement the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made on 5 August 2021. Speaking in a TV interview, the Ukrainian President said that the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine will never be Russian, and he encouraged residents there who consider themselves Russian and would want the region to become part of the Russian Federation to go and seek a place in Russia. However, in a large contradiction to the claim, Zelenskyy never said anything about relocating ethnic Russian people from the Donbas region, while the Ukrainian government has never shown any intention of that, either.
One of the Kremlin’s most common disinformation narratives to justify its devastating war against Ukraine and illegal referenda is the lie that Russia is pursuing the “denazification” of Ukraine, a claim already widely debunked, including by EUvsDisinfo. Learn more about the reasons behind the Kremlin's obsession with framing Ukraine as a Nazi state in the EUvsDisinfo analysis titled "Why does Putin portray himself as the tamer of neo-Nazism".
Read our recent referenda-related analysis "Mad rush for illegitimate hold on occupied territories" and along with EU vs Disinfo's Guide to Deciphering Pro-Kremlin disinformation around Putin's War.