The Security Service of Ukraine said it had intercepted documents indicating that pro-Russian separatists in the Donetsk region plan to recruit children aged 13 to 17 to participate in referendums on joining Russia. Minors will be able to “vote” accompanied by their parents or guardians at the “polling station”.

In this way, the aggressors hope to expand the “electoral base” of support for the Kremlin’s project to join the eastern part of Ukraine to the aggressor country.

According to the received materials, the leaders of the occupation administration plan to involve local residents aged 13 to 17 in the pseudo-referendum, the SBU reports.

At the expense of small “voters”, the occupiers are trying to artificially increase the catastrophic lack of “votes” in order to legitimize the fake plebiscite.

In order to strengthen control over the “voting turnout”, minors must be accompanied to the “polling station” by their parents, guardians or representatives of the so-called “children’s homes” in the temporarily occupied territory of the region.

Also, in order to “inflate the indicators” of the pseudo-referendum, they plan to involve families from the Donetsk region, who have an address in Donetsk, but temporarily left for the Russian Federation.

Moscow entrusted the so-called “CEC of the LPR” with the relevant changes to the “election process”.

It was this pseudo-state entity that prepared draft documents in the form of a “decision” and an appendix on holding a referendum with the participation of minors.

So far, the SBU has identified all the organizers of “illegal activities, established their location and documented the crimes.”

Vladimir Putin supported the annexation referendum

On September 20, separatist authorities in all Russian-controlled Ukrainian territories coordinated to announce referendums on unification with Russia, an initiative that was immediately supported by several high-ranking officials in Moscow.

In a speech he delivered on Wednesday morning to announce Russia’s partial mobilization, President Vladimir Putin, in turn, said he supported holding the referendums, which will take place from September 23 to 27.

Meduza journalists claim that Putin would be convinced to hold these referendums, despite the fact that the Russian army was only able to occupy about 60% of Donetsk region due to panic among pro-Russian separatists after the collapse of the Kharkiv front. and fears that Moscow’s armed forces could lose even more territory they have seized in Ukraine.

Several Meduza interlocutors emphasized that the Russian authorities do not even intend to create the “illusion of legitimacy” regarding the annexation referendums.

“It will be important to organize some kind of vote and report the results,” one of the sources explained, adding that electronic voting is planned because it is easier to manipulate.

On September 5, pro-Russian separatists in Kherson announced that they were “stopping” plans to organize a referendum with Russia in the context of a counteroffensive by Ukrainians in this region in the south of their country.

What is Russia actually planning for the occupied Ukrainian territories

Investigative journalists of Meduza, who reported for the first time in June that Vladimir Putin wants to annex all occupied Ukrainian territories, not just the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, then claimed that the Kremlin intends to unite these territories into a single federal county. to join Russia.

One of the sources close to the Kremlin, cited by the Meduza website, which has been banned in Russia since March, said that the current heads of the two “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine, Denys Pushylin and Leonid Pasechinik, may lose their positions. replaced by Russian officials who were considered more loyal.