NYT Russia-Ukraine War Briefing 9/23/2022
 September 23, 2022 |
 | By Yana Dlugy |
via email 9/23/2022
Welcome to the Russia-Ukraine War Briefing, your guide to the latest news and analysis about the conflict. |
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Russia’s sham votes |
Russian proxy officials began holding referendums today in four occupied regions of Ukraine, asking residents to join Russia. The move is widely seen as a sham that could provide Moscow with a pretext to escalate the war. |
Ukrainians were forced to vote under the watchful eyes of Russian soldiers. Some residents hid inside their homes amid fears that voting “no” could mean being abducted or worse. |
The West has condemned the voting as illegal, and Ukrainian officials have dismissed them as grotesque theater — staged polls in cities destroyed by Russian bombardment and abandoned by most residents. |
The referendums will run over five days, until Tuesday, in Donetsk and Luhansk in the east and Kherson and Zaporizka in the south. The voting is taking place at designated sites and through door-to-door sweeps. Ukrainian officials said that workers were being forced to vote under threat of losing their jobs. |
There is only one question on the ballot: Do you wish to secede from Ukraine and create an independent state that will enter the Russian Federation? |
There’s little suspense about the outcome. A similar vote held in Crimea in 2014 laid the groundwork for Russia’s annexation of the peninsula. Official results claimed that 97 percent of voters in Crimea had opted to join Russia and that turnout was more than 80 percent. |
A similar outcome is likely this time, according to analysts. To give the appearance of widespread participation, minors ages 13 to 17 have been encouraged to vote, according to Ukrainian officials. |
“Stay at home if possible and do not open the door to strangers,” the exiled mayor of Enerhodar, a Russian-controlled city, told residents in a message on Telegram. |
Russia’s annexation of the four regions could open up a dangerous new phase in the war. (Tomorrow will be seven months since Russia invaded.) |
President Vladimir Putin could claim that the Ukrainian offensive in the south and the east, shored up by weapons supplied by the West, is an attack on Russia itself. Russia controls nearly all of Luhansk and Kherson, but only a fraction of Zaporizka and Donetsk. |
In Enerhodar, in southeastern Ukraine, some residents said they feared that one of the first consequences of annexation would be conscription of Ukrainians into the Russian military. That has already taken place in parts of Luhansk and Donetsk occupied by Russia since 2014. |
Western leaders made clear that they will not recognize the results of the votes. “These sham referenda initiated today by Russia and its proxies have no legal effect or legitimacy, as demonstrated by Russia’s hasty methods of organisation, which in no way respect democratic norms, and its blatant intimidation of local populations,” the leaders of the Group of 7 countries said in a statement. |
From Opinion: By annexing Ukrainian territory, Putin will subjugate the people living there, writes Sasha Vasilyuk, a Ukrainian-born Russian American writer with family in Donetsk. |
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Resistance to the draft |
Putin’s move to call up reservists has torn open the cocoon that had shielded much of Russian society from the war. |
As Russia’s conscription machine swung into action, military-age men clogged airports and border crossings, some ending up in remote cities like Namangan, Uzbekistan. |
Reports of large numbers of men receiving draft notices arrived from across the country. Regions in Siberia and in the largely Muslim Caucasus Mountains appeared to be among the hardest hit. |
“Then the war started there,” Grigory Vaypan, a Russian lawyer, said of the invasion on Feb. 24. “Now it also started here.” |
The call-up is being managed by local military commissariats that, according to Russia’s defense minister, have some 25 million draft-eligible adults on their rolls. |
Amid widespread objections to the Kremlin’s draft, the defense ministry announced exemptions today for certain white-collar jobs in banking, I.T. and telecommunications. |
The move came after businesses like airlines, tech companies and agricultural firms complained that the draft could badly affect their operations. Some companies said 50 percent to 80 percent of their employees could be called up, and many prepared lists of essential workers in advance of requesting their exemption, according to the newspaper Kommersant. |
Draftees were being taken by plane out of remote Arctic villages, an activist in Yakutsk, the capital of the Yakutia region, told The Times. “They have planted panic and fear everywhere,” she said. |
In the Buryatia region, teachers have been tasked with distributing draft notices, according to activists. In Dagestan, an impoverished region in the south, anti-draft protesters blocked a federal highway yesterday. |
“When we fought in 1941 to 1945 — that was a war,” one man yelled in a video of an angry crowd widely shared on social media. “And now it’s not war, it’s politics.” |
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Thanks for reading. I’ll be back Monday. — Yana |
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Putin’s Draft Draws Resistance in Russia’s Far-Flung Regions
ReplyDeleteVillagers, activists and some officials have asked why President Vladimir Putin’s draft seems to be hitting poor, rural areas harder than big cities.
Even pro-draft hawks criticized the rollout, as people with health problems or without combat experience received notices and some volunteers were turned away.
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