NATO and Washington in Outrage over Voting in Ukraine’s South and East

Sept. 20, 2022 (EIRNS)—There was more than a little outrage among the Western defenders of “democratic values,” over the decision of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and two of the neighboring Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine—Kherson and Zaporozhye—to over joining the Russian Federation. It has been no secret for the last eight years, since the February 2014 Anglo-American coup in Kiev eliminated the elected government, that the peoples of South and Eastern Ukraine, have been shelled by Kiev regime, as their political parties and Russian-language media were shut down; and now speaking or teaching Russian has been suppressed in public documents, schools, libraries, etc.

Outbursts against the Sept. 23 referenda exploded from the regime in Kiev, NATO, Brussels, the Pentagon, the State Department, and others:

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg tweeted: “Sham referendums have no legitimacy and do not change the nature of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.” It’s “a further escalation in Putin’s war.... The international community must condemn this blatant violation of international law and step up support for Ukraine.” Sham referendums are ones that don’t go your way.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, at today’s White House press briefing, called the referenda “an affront to principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity.... We will never recognize this territory as anything other than a part of Ukraine.” That was before the U.S. spent $5 billion adjusting Ukraine’s sovereignty.

State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel, in an Aug. 30 briefing, offered a version of “sham referendum,” purposefully confounding joining the Russian Federation with the “Eurasian Customs Union,” which he likewise confounds with the Eurasian Economic Union. “We expect Russia to manipulate the results of these referenda in order to falsely claim that the Ukrainian people want to join Russia. As part of the sham referenda, Russia will undoubtedly employ propaganda and disinformation campaigns, falsify voter turnout, and exaggerate the percentage of those who supposedly voted in favor of joining Russia. We want to be clear: any claim by the Kremlin that the Ukrainian people somehow want to join Russia is a lie. Polling shows that just 3% of Ukrainians say that they would like Ukraine to be a member of the Russia-led Eurasian Customs Union.” The poll that he relies upon was run in 2015 by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), which excluded precisely the areas that are planning referenda.

The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell similarly lied “these illegal ‘votes’ cannot be considered under any circumstance as the free expression of the will of the people living in these regions under constant Russian military threat and intimidation,” ignoring that the Nazi-backed government installed in 2014 had shelled Russian-speaking Donbass for eight years, killing 14,000 Ukrainian citizens. These murders prompted Lugansk and Donetsk to legally secede from Ukraine, which were recognized by Moscow, which conceded requests for military security on Feb. 21, 2022.