The proposed date is not accidental at all. This corresponds, in fact, to the day of “National Unity”. The city of Kherson could be targeted, respectively Le Pointquoted by Rador.

Vladimir Putin’s party “United Russia” proposed on Wednesday – September 7 to hold referendums on November 4 in Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian troops with the aim of joining them to Russia.

“Donetsk, Luhansk and many other Russian cities will finally return to their native territories. And the Russian world, today divided by formal borders, will restore its integrity,” the party said, according to Andriy Turchak, secretary of the General Council of United Russia.

“It would be advisable to hold these referendums in Donbas and the liberated territories on November 4,” added Andriy Turchak, quoted by the Ria Novosti agency. The official is referring to Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts (East), whose independence Moscow recognized immediately before the offensive on February 24, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts, which are mainly occupied by the Russian military.

“We will prepare for this specific date,” said Kyrylo Stremusov, an official of the government established by Moscow in Kherson, according to Russian agencies. On November 4, Russia celebrates the Day of National Unity in memory of the popular uprising in the 17th century, which drove the Polish occupying forces from Moscow.

Russian troops, which entered Ukraine on February 24, occupy territories mainly in the south of the country, especially the city of Kherson, which had 280,000 inhabitants before the war.

Pro-Russian separatists have controlled most of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the country’s industrial east since 2014. Russia already held a referendum in March 2014 in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula it annexed after that vote, which was preceded by the intervention of Russian special forces.

The Russian occupation authorities in Ukraine have been pushing the idea of ​​a referendum on joining Russia for months, but Kherson’s administration said on Monday that a vote was uncertain in the near future due to the ongoing counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces in the region. Russia distributed Russian passports to residents of the occupied territories in Ukraine, as it has done in recent years to those in the east under the control of separatists.

For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said on Wednesday that forces in Kyiv had recaptured several towns in the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine from Russian forces, without giving details.

“This week we have good news from the Kharkiv region,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an evening video speech broadcast on social networks. Refusing to name them, he called “the settlements where the Ukrainian flag returned.”

In recent days, observers have reported on the alleged advance of Ukrainian troops in the Kharkiv region, but this information has not been verified by an independent source. Since last week, Ukraine has been conducting a counteroffensive in the south of its territory, in which it also claims success, while Moscow claims to have inflicted heavy losses on the enemy.

Since the beginning of the invasion on February 24, the Kharkiv region has been partially occupied by the Russian army. The city of the same name, the second largest in Ukraine, is regularly subjected to deadly bombings, but Moscow forces have never been able to capture it.