Russia’s planned vote in occupied Ukraine risks legitimizing land grab, Chalyi warns

13 August, 05:09 PM

Interview

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Election advertising in occupied Donetsk (Photo: REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko)

Valerii Chalyi, board chair of the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, told Radio NV what conclusions Ukraine should draw from the ban and where its attention should be focused.

This is all very simple. This is no longer the once-influential Yavlinsky-Boldyrev-Lukin bloc.

Let me remind you that 60,000–70,000 protesters once gathered on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. Those days are long gone. Russia is no longer merely a managed democracy. It is now a police state and a dictatorship.

The ban shows that, even under these conditions, the authorities had wanted to preserve some illusion that remnants of Russia’s former system still existed — a picture intended for the West.

Although I do not really understand why. They have not admitted observers to these elections, so the results are already predetermined. They already know what result they want to assign United Russia — Putin’s party and Medvedev’s party.

On the one hand, this decision shows their weakness. They cannot guarantee the result they want under these conditions, and events remain unpredictable. Even within the Russian farce that replaced elections long ago, people inside the system would still know the actual figures.

So they decided it would be easier to remove even that uncertainty and dispense with the game altogether. This is an outright turn toward totalitarianism, with everything under control. All the other so-called parties are fully controlled by the Kremlin, so the contest will simply be staged among them.

They do not even have someone as unruly as Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who represented the security services. He was created by the KGB and later by the Russian security services, but he still helped create the appearance of political competition. Now even that is gone. Russia is clearly moving toward totalitarianism. No illusion remains.

The second and more troubling issue is that everything in Russia has been suppressed so thoroughly that there are almost no protests. A few hundred people tried to speak out. I can imagine what would happen if someone tried to ban democratic processes in Ukraine — the country would erupt.

Russia is different. Russia has subjects. There is a czar, and there are his subjects. Some try to speak out, but they follow Tolstoy’s principle of ‘nonresistance to evil by force.’ Or they behave like Gerasim in ‘Mumu,’ killing his own dog because that is what is required of him. Nothing comes of it.

What have Putin’s rule and the security services’ grip on power since 2000 produced? This. The election will not merely be a farce. This time, it will be an undisguised one.

And forget about those ‘good Russians,’ most of whom live abroad. What did they call for? They said, ‘Let’s protest.’ How? ‘Let’s all come to the polls at noon.’ Not at different times, but all at noon, when there is no one to vote for in the first place.

To be fair, some of them, including Vladimir Kara-Murza and others, said this would indeed be a farce. It is also very strange that Alexei Navalny’s wife — the wife of a man who gave his life — is likewise urging people to go to the polls. That would legitimize Putin’s elections.

So there is nothing more to discuss there.

The main issue we should be discussing is Russia’s attempt to carry out this process, which it will call an ‘election,’ in the occupied parts of Ukraine. This is the first time since the full-scale invasion that Russia has tried to hold State Duma elections on Ukrainian territory. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry has issued a lengthy and appropriate statement on the matter.

What caught my attention? We say these proceedings will have absolutely no validity, that they are legally void and fake. But there is one problem: The Foreign Ministry statement does not say that Ukraine cannot guarantee security on its occupied territory.

That is my position. I believe Ukraine should officially state that no one should attempt to organize anything on Ukrainian territory on Sept. 20 or gather people at gunpoint. They plan to establish polling stations, which will naturally be guarded by armed personnel. In my view, that makes those sites lawful targets.

They are putting people in danger. They will use Ukrainians who, unfortunately, remain in the occupied territories as human shields and then tell everyone that they held elections there.

And I will tell you this: The time will come when everything else is forgotten. But the claim that ‘we held elections’ and that Russia has support there will remain. It will become the first major step toward legitimizing Russia’s claim to the territory. After all, they will argue that Ukraine cannot hold elections there, while Russia can.

That is what Ukraine and all our efforts should focus on now. What happens in Moscow and in places where we have no influence will happen regardless.

In my view, this farce still requires attention, including in cyberspace. It calls for active measures by Ukraine.

Our primary focus, using every available mechanism, should be Crimea and the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, as well as the occupied parts of Zaporizhzhya and Kherson oblasts, where Russia also plans to hold elections.

We cannot allow so-called observers to travel there. That work should have begun yesterday. No further crimes should be committed on our territory while it remains temporarily occupied. Holding such elections is a crime under international law and the Geneva Convention. When an aggressor and occupying power tries to create the appearance that it is holding elections there, that is an outright crime.

We cannot simply sit back and tell people not to travel to those territories. We must make it absolutely clear that holding anything in the occupied territories is dangerous. It would mean committing another crime and putting people at risk of being killed.

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