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At the Russian consulate in London, Russians participating in the vote resoundingly rejected the motion to change the constitution, with 80.5% voting "no" and only 19.3% voting "yes."
According to the official results, the only region inside Russia to vote against the motion was the Nenets Autonomous Okrug on Russia’s icy far northern coast, which only has 44,000 inhabitants.
Some have claimed that the referendum is Russia's most rigged vote to date. Certainly it is clear the authorities were heavy handed in their efforts to get the result they wanted. Shpilkin’s estimate of an extra 22.4mn votes injected into the count is more than double the extra 10mn votes that are believed to have been injected into the 2018 presidential race.
The European Union has called on Russia to probe reports of irregularities in a national, non-binding plebiscite that approved a sprawling package of constitutional amendments.
"We are aware of reports and allegations of irregularities during the vote, including voter coercion, double voting, violation of secrecy of the vote, and allegations of police violence against a journalist who was present to observe," EU spokesman Peter Stano said. "We expect these reports to be duly investigated, because these are serious allegations," Stano added.
Ella Pamfilova, head of the commission overseeing the vote, said balloting had been transparent and there was no evidence of vote rigging.
Anti-corruption blogger and opposition activist Alexei Navalny lambasted the vote and called for protests once the coronavirus restrictions are removed.
"The just-announced 'results' are a fake and a huge lie," Navalny wrote in a blog post on July 1. "They have nothing in common with the opinions of the citizens of Russia. We have witnessed
a show, the ending of which was scripted in advance."
Russia’s “passportization” of the Donbas
bne IntelliNews
Since the spring of 2014, Russia has handed out nearly 200,000 Russian passports to Ukrainians living in the Donbas and Luhansk “People’s Republics.” Although Moscow maintains that this is a “practical measure” motivated by humanitarian concerns, Kyiv considers it a further violation of Ukraine’s state sovereignty.
According to researcher Fabian Burkhardt, Moscow’s “passportization” efforts in Donbas are not only “part of a tried and tested set of foreign policy instruments,” but also a deliberate effort to create “controlled instability”
in the region. “Russia wants to secure permanent influence over the two separatist territories without directly seeking annexation,” he explains.
As a geopolitical strategy, handing out Russian citizenship allows the Kremlin to “exert permanent pressure” on the authorities in Kyiv without any military escalation. This, in turn, “torpedoes the Minsk peace process,” while “the delay in conflict resolution contributes to making Russia comparatively more attractive as a country of emigration for Ukrainians.”
In other words, Russia’s “passportization” efforts seek to address a persistent domestic problem, as well. “The Donbas conflict area serves as a source of migration for counteracting, in the long term, both Russia’s population decline and shortages in its labour market,” Burkhardt explains.
As such, Burkhardt argues that both Ukraine and its international partners should respond by taking a critical look at their own policies towards the civilian population living in the Donbas. The EU and its member states should be playing a larger humanitarian role in the region, he says, in addition to recognizing their own contributions to population decline across Ukraine.
“The EU should also encourage Ukraine to implement existing plans to simplify crossing of the Line of Contact in the wake of the pandemic, to reduce bureaucracy in processing documents and using social assistance,” Burkhardt concludes. “The isolation of the [non-government controlled areas] caused by Covid-19 is a massive factor in [government-controlled] Ukraine’s alienation from them, which inevitably increases Russia’s influence.”
This article originally appeared in FPRI's BMB Ukraine/Russia newsletter.
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