Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expected orchestration of referendums to incorporate occupied territories of Ukraine into Russia “is a sign of weakness,” according to U.S. and European powers.
“We’ve seen reports that Russia is now considering proceeding with the sham referendum in Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday afternoon on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. “At the same time, we’re seeing reports that President Putin is contemplating mobilizing more of Russia’s reserves, throwing more young Russians into his desperate quest to seize another country. … It’s a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of Russian failure.”
Putin’s allies across the government in Moscow touted the idea of staging putative popular votes over the coming days that would formalize Russia’s absorption of Ukrainian territory. Western leaders long have denounced such initiatives as illegitimate given that they would be conducted during a military occupation, but a chorus of Western condemnation took on a derisive note in light of Ukraine’s recent battlefield successes.
“We are all aware as well that a negotiation will only be successful if Ukraine is liberated and its sovereignty is protected,” French President Emmanuel Macron told the General Assembly on Tuesday. “Russia must now see that it cannot impose its will militarily, even if there are fake, pretend ‘referenda’ in territories that have been bombed and are now occupied.”
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Russian officials signaled their intention to hold a series of putative elections in the Donbas region, where the war in Ukraine has been fought for the longest, as well as two other areas seized by Russian forces in the months since Putin launched the campaign to overthrow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“After they are held and the new territories are taken into Russia’s fold, a geopolitical transformation of the world will become irreversible,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a member of the Russian Security Council under Putin, wrote on Telegram earlier Tuesday.
Medvedev and other Russian officials, as well as their proxies in the contested areas of Ukraine, touted the prospect of the votes as Russian state media prepared for an unusual Tuesday evening address from Putin. The address was postponed, however, leaving Putin’s voice unheard, beyond a ceremonial event earlier Tuesday, as officials in Kyiv and the world leaders in New York contemplate how Putin will respond to the recent Ukrainian successes.
“The situation on the front line clearly indicates that the initiative belongs to Ukraine,” Zelensky said in one of his regular updates from Kyiv. “Of course, today there is quite high-profile news from Russia. Lots of questions about this. But what actually happened? What did we hear that had not been heard before? Our positions are clear and well known. Only this should interest us — not what sounds somewhere but what is our task.”
The recent Ukrainian counteroffensive was timed in part to disrupt the Russian-orchestrated “referendum,” which had been expected to occur in early September. As it is, the controversy coincided with the annual high-level meeting at the U.N. headquarters. Macron, who has been faulted in Ukrainian circles and by some members of NATO for trying to maintain a relationship with Putin during the war, delivered an unusually sharp rebuke of Russia.
“Who can believe that Russia just has to win this war for us to move on to something else? Nobody can believe that,” he said. “Contemporary imperialism is not Western. It’s not European. It takes the form of a territorial invasion, linked with a hybrid modernized war that uses energy prices, food insecurity, nuclear safety, access to information, and population movements as weapons for division and destruction. And it’s there — that is how the war undermines all of our sovereignty.”
Macron attempted to drive a wedge between Russia and the countries of the developing world, perhaps especially in Africa, that have a negative memory of Western European colonialism and have declined to join international efforts to constrain Russia’s assault on Ukraine. He denounced Moscow’s call for a new world order as a bad faith initiative by a selfish power, underscoring the point with mockery of Russia’s performance during the pandemic.
“Let us not cede to the cynicism that rejects this order that we’ve built together,” he said. “Who, during the pandemic, was there proposing financing for the climate transition? Not those who are now proposing a new international order and who didn’t have functional vaccines and who were not in solidarity and who didn’t contribute anything for the environment.”
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Blinken pressed a variant of that argument. “That both of these things are happening this week, as we’re at the United Nations, shows his utter contempt and disdain for the United Nations, for the General Assembly, for the United Nations Charter,” he said. “The very principles that we’re here to uphold this week in the charter — sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity — are what are being violently aggressed by Russia, including through the attempts to proceed with these referenda and putting even more forces into the effort to seize Ukrainian sovereign territory.”
