Russian military entering voting booths? “We apologize for publishing information that we were unable to verify 100%”

The Russian disinformation campaign about the war in Ukraine is not going to stop now, this time in the context of the three days of presidential elections in Russia which, unsurprisingly, gave victory to Vladimir Putin. This time, for the first time, the Russian president won with the votes of Ukrainians who have lived for more than two years under Russian occupation in the east of the country, where according to several reports from residents many were forced to vote “at gunpoint”.

The video is 14 seconds long and began to be shared on Telegram on Saturday, the second of three days of presidential elections in Russia which, unsurprisingly, gave victory to Vladimir Putin. In it, a man in uniform, with his face covered, is seen entering a voting booth and peering over the shoulder of a voter in the middle of voting, in an apparent attempt to ensure that he puts the cross on the “right candidate” among the candidates. four that appeared in the bulletins.

The video was shared on numerous channels on the most popular social network in Russia, including in the group “Time to vote, now SHHH” (free translation, in which SHHH works as an acronym for the Russian Central Electoral Commission). In this group, the clip appeared accompanied by a description of the images, to which the note was later added: “We previously published a video of a security force agent controlling a voting booth with a voter inside. We cannot confirm [a sua veracidade], but we cannot refute it either. Maybe it’s a staged video, maybe not. In any case, we apologize for publishing information that we were unable to verify 100%.”

It is possible that the video is part of the disinformation campaign that marked the most recent elections in the country, a Russian investigative journalist who has lived in exile since the start of the war in Ukraine tells CNN. “It is important in the context of an evident concerted effort to sow an absurd amount of ‘fakes’ in the Russian media”, he adds, speaking anonymously for security reasons. “Some independent media used this video, so it appears to be a campaign to discredit them – the video is the bait to then ‘expose’ the falsehood and say ‘See, these guys will believe anything’.”

Fictional or not, the video is representative of what human rights organizations denounced as a campaign of “repression and intimidation” during the elections – either in the Russian Federation or in the occupied territories of Ukraine. (“The real images you will see on the networks of soldiers with ballot boxes probably come from occupied Ukraine”, says the same source.)

According to the OVD organization, at least 74 people were detained in various parts of Russia on Sunday, the last day of voting, in addition to undetermined numbers throughout Friday and Saturday. (CNN contacted the organization to find out what kind of complaints and data it had compiled about potential electoral violations, but did not receive a response at the time of publishing this article.)

Cited by Reuters, the organization Golos (“Voice”) – described by the news agency as “the only electoral monitoring body independent of the Russian authorities” – denounced a series of other violations, starting precisely with complaints from authorities agents peering over the shoulders of voters as they voted.

In a statement, the organization founded in 2000 (the same year in which Putin became the Russian president for the first time) cites the presence of police officers at several polling stations, and lists some concrete allegations – such as a case that occurred in the Moscow region, in which agents demanded that an election official open a sealed ballot box and hand them the ballots, and another, also in the capital, in which an agent “took the completed ballot from a voter’s hand to see who she voted for.”

Reuters was unable to independently verify any of the incidents described. On social network X, an independent news site https://twitter.com/mediazzzona/status/1769744815611170913?s=46&t=CDpsvV7G41tREQ7PxLC4hA showing an incident recorded by an election observer at polling station No. 1136 in the Krasnoselsky district of Saint Petersburg, in which a voter is led away in handcuffs by law enforcement officers after a heated exchange about the secrecy of his vote. OVD shared the same video on social media. (“This one, unlike the other, is real,” the Russian journalist quoted at the beginning of this article assured CNN.)

More visible and verifiable were the protests that filled headlines around the world throughout the three days of voting, with attacks on voting stations with Molotov cocktails and green paint spilled inside ballot boxes. In total, the head of the electoral commission announced, 29 polling stations in 20 Russian regions were attacked by “scoundrels” who, warned Ella Pamfilova, face five years in prison. Former president Dmitri Medvedev – who held the position during the mandate that Putin was unable to fulfill consecutively (with Putin as his prime minister) – said that those detained could be accused of treason against the country.

Even worse reports have come from occupied Ukraine, of armed guards going door to door in the regions of Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, occupied since the large-scale invasion in 2022, and also in the Crimean peninsula, which the Russia has occupied it for a decade. Quoted by the Washington Post, Yevheniia Hliebova denounced a “brigade of electoral officials [russos] accompanied by an armed soldier” walking from door to door in the village of Novomykolaivka, in Zaporizhzhia.

“He was carrying a gun, so it was a threat, not verbal, but in fact it was a threat of violence” during “gunpoint elections,” Yevheniia described – echoing an expression used by the Center for National Resistance of Ukraine in a recent report, which highlighted that “voting at gunpoint is yet another Russian crime against civilians”.

According to the group, citing anonymous sources, thousands of members of the Russian National Guard, police and private security guards were sent to protect polling places in Ukrainian regions under occupation and “mobile electoral commissions” created in areas of the most intense bombing. To the Washington Post, a former resident of Kherson said that his niece, who still lives in the region, was approached in a door-to-door operation by a woman accompanied by two Russian soldiers.

Other sources in the occupied areas, cited by the Kyiv Independent newspaper, anonymously reported similar scenarios, of soldiers from the occupation forces gathering groups of Ukrainians to force them to vote. Quoted by Al-Jazeera, a former resident of Mariupol in Donetsk said that those who continue to live there were “forced to submit to the regime [de Putin] and pretend to support everything that is happening, out of fear for your own life.” The same source said that the vote was not secret – with Ivan Fedorov, head of the Zaporizhzhia regional military administration, equating mobilization efforts for these Russian elections to a fictional television series and writing on Telegram that Russian forces continue to “terrorize” the Ukrainians in the east to convince them that they will stay forever in the territories they have occupied for more than two years.

Cited by the New York Times, political analysts and Ukrainian authorities say that, in the occupied territories, the Russian presidential elections were, more than just another vote decided in favor of Putin, a way for Moscow to advance the war on two unarmed fronts: to perpetuate the occupation and identify dissidents. In official statements, Russian authorities made no reference to the dozens of reports from local residents and social media posts about military interference in the vote, but, according to the newspaper, they confirmed and justified the presence of troops in eastern Ukraine as “ necessary” to protect the vote and the collection of ballot boxes.

This Monday, Amnesty International (AI) published an assessment of the 10 years of occupation and “repression” of Crimea and a report on the persecution and “suppression” of the identities of the Tatar minority and Ukrainians on the peninsula since 2014. Contacted by CNN, AI said that no type of publication is planned for now on the reports of violations during the presidential elections and that, if an investigation is carried out during the electoral and post-electoral period, it is likely that the results will be published take some time.

For the next few days, the organization has planned to publish material on the networks about the last 24 years that Putin was in power. With all the votes counted, and under the united protest of the West regarding the lack of transparency, justice and freedom – before, during and after the elections – the Russian electoral commission today announced a “record” turnout of 77.5% and Putin’s re-election with 87.3% of the votes. At 71 years old, he will remain in the Russian presidency until at least 2030, when he will be closer to breaking another record previously held by Stalin – that of the longest-serving leader in power in Russia in the last 200 years.