A Kremlin-orchestrated referendum got underway in occupied regions of Ukraine that sought to make them part of Russia - with some officials carrying ballots to apartment blocks accompanied by gun-toting police. 9News
, with some officials carrying ballots to apartment blocks accompanied by gun-toting police. Kyiv and the West condemned it as a rigged election whose result was preordained by Moscow., UN experts and Ukrainian officials pointed to new evidence of Russian war crimes. Kharkiv region officials said a mass burial site in the eastern city of Izium held hundreds of bodies, including at least 30 displaying signs of torture.
Citing safety reasons, election officials carried ballots to homes and set up mobile polling stations for the four-day voting period. Russian state TV showed one such election team accompanied by a masked police officer carrying an assault rifle. Lawmaker Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia's State Duma, said in an online statement to the regions: “If you decide to become part of the Russian Federation, we will support you.”
“You are already accomplices in all these crimes, murders and torture of Ukrainians,” he said. “Because you were silent. Because you are silent. And now it’s time for you to choose. For men in Russia, this is a choice to die or live, to become a cripple or to preserve health. For women in Russia, the choice is to lose their husbands, sons, grandchildren forever, or still try to protect them from death, from war, from one person.
Other Russian men tried desperately to leave the country, buying up scarce plane tickets and creating traffic jams hours or even days long at some borders. The lines of cars were so long at the border with Kazakhstan that some people abandoned their vehicles and walked - just as some Ukrainians did after Russia invaded their country on February 24.
Russian forces occupied Izium for six months before being pushed out by a Ukrainian counteroffensive this month. The exhumations, which began a week ago, are nearing an end, as investigators work on identifying victims and how they died. A mobile DNA lab was parked at the edge of the burial site.
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