Ukrainian citizens from the occupied territories in the Donbas have been given Russian passports and bussed into the country to vote in the ongoing parliamentary elections there, according to reports by independent Russian media.
The Caucasian Knot news outlet reported that approximately 400 Ukrainian citizens were taken on buses to Russian passport offices to receive their new documents on Sept. 17, after which they were immediately driven to Russia’s southern Rostov Oblast, which lies to the east of Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.
One woman who was brought to vote in the city of Krasny Sulin along with 200 others, told Caucasian Knot that she had come from Krasnodon (an occupied city in Ukraine’s Luhansk Oblast), that she was not familiar with any of the candidates, and that she was there because the Russian authorities made her vote to get her Russian passport.
According to Russian TV station Dozhd, Russia’s Central Election Commission received 137 complaints about coercion to vote as of Sept. 18.
Despite widespread reports of electoral fraud in this round of Russian parliamentary elections, held between Sept. 17 and 19, all of the bussed voters asked for comment by Caucasian Knot said that they had not been instructed to vote for any particular candidate.
Earlier on Sept. 16, the leader of Russia-backed Donbas militants, Denis Pushilin, announced that over 800 bus and train trips had been arranged to transport residents of occupied Donbas to Russia in order to vote.
On Sept. 9, Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsperson, Liudmyla Denisova, told Ukrainian news channel Dom that Ukrainians in occupied Donbas were being forced to vote in the Duma elections on pain of fines or dismissal from their jobs.
She said that a total of over 600,000 Russian passports had been issued to Ukrainians in the self-proclaimed people’s republics of the Donbas, which are proxy groups funded and controlled by the Russian government, since the start of the Donbas war in April 2014.
