Kreml: Cherson, Luhansk, Donetsk och Zaporizjzja annekteras under fredagen

Russia’s claimed observers in Ukraine ‘referendums’ violate numerous international principles – experts

The foreigners that Russian state media routinely cite as being international observers to the so-called referendums in four regions of Ukraine are violating numerous international principles of election observation and are engaging in nothing more than “political activism,” experts in the field told CNN.

“What they do is not election observation at all,” Anton Shekhovtsov, who writes reports on fake election observation for the European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE), a German and European Union-backed NGO, said Tuesday. “It’s a political activity that is only masquerading as election observation.”

The Russian state news agency TASS has over the past week regularly quoted the observations of people it calls international observers as proof that the so-called referendums being held in the occupied portions of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions are free and fair.

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Among them was that an international election observer mission must respect the “sovereignty of the country holding elections,” and that the host country – in this case, Ukraine – should issue an invitation for international observers. Neither of those principles has been met in this case.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/27/e...ntl/index.html

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which monitors elections, listed a number of reasons why the referendums would have no legal force:

- they do not meet international standards
- run contrary to Ukrainian law
- the areas are not secure
- there will be no independent observers
- much of the population has fled

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ntrolled-parts