Russia’s ruling party is likely to claim a resounding victory in local elections that end Sunday and act as both a dry run for President Vladimir Putin’s reelection next year and an attempt to strengthen the country’s grip on four occupied areas in Ukraine.
Voters in 85 regions casting their ballot in an election for a range of regional and municipal offices. Russian authorities also are staging local elections in the occupied areas of four Ukrainian regions — Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson — which Moscow annexed a year ago in illegal referendums.
“These elections are important” and offer authorities a way to test voting systems and probe which issues and narratives appeal to voters, said Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Kremlin needs to check it works well ahead of the 2024 reelection of Putin, where the goal would be to showcase the societal unity around Putin despite the war and the economic cost through high electoral numbers.
Putin’s also using the elections in the four annexed Ukrainian regions that he partly controls to cement his territorial claim, as Kyiv’s counter-offensive has yet to achieve a decisive breakthrough, despite billions in US and European weapons supplies. Regional voting also is taking place in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
The voting in those territories is “a blatant violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, Ukrainian laws and international law — in particular the UN statute,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. “Pseudo-elections by Russia on temporarily occupied territories are legally void. They will not change the status of Ukrainian territories seized by the Russian army.
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