Russia poised to annex occupied parts of Ukraine after sham vote

Kyiv: Russia was poised Wednesday to formally annex parts of Ukraine where occupied areas held a Kremlin-orchestrated referendum denounced by Kyiv and the West as illegal and rigged on living under Moscow's rule.

Armed troops had gone door-to-door with election officials to collect ballots in five days of voting.

The results were widely ridiculed as implausible and characterised as a land grab by an increasingly cornered Russian leadership following embarrassing military losses in Ukraine.

Moscow-installed administrations in the four regions of southern and eastern Ukraine claimed Tuesday night that residents had voted to join Russia.

Forcing people in these territories to fill out some papers at the barrel of a gun is yet another Russian crime in the course of its aggression against Ukraine, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry said, adding that the balloting was a propaganda show and null and worthless. The ballot was falsified and the outcome implausibly claimed that residents had agreed to rule from Moscow, the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War said.

Pro-Russia officials in Ukraine's Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions said Wednesday they would ask Russian President Vladimir Putin to incorporate their provinces into Russia.

It wasn't immediately clear how the administrative process would unfold.

According to Russia-installed election officials, 93% of the ballots cast in the Zaporizhzhia region supported annexation, as did 87% in the Kherson region, 98% in the Luhansk region and 99% in Donetsk.

Western countries, however, dismissed the balloting as a meaningless pretense staged by Moscow in an attempt to legitimise its invasion of Ukraine launched on Feb. 24.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said Washington would propose a Security Council resolution to condemn the sham vote. The resolution would also urge member states not to recognize any altered status of Ukraine and demand that Russia withdraws its troops from its neighbor, she tweeted.

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell calling the vote illegal and describing the results as falsified. This is another violation of Ukraine's sovereignty (and) territorial integrity, (amid) systematic abuses of human rights, he tweeted. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry statement asked the EU, NATO and the Group of Seven major industrial nations to immediately and significantly step up pressure on Russia with new sanctions and by significantly increasing their military aid to Kyiv.

The Kremlin remained unmoved amid the hail of criticism. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that at the very least, Russia intended to drive Ukrainian forces out of the Donetsk region, where Moscow's troops and separatist forces currently control about 60% of the territory.