MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s central election commission on Thursday set the date for regional elections in four Ukrainian provinces that Moscow claims to have annexed for Sept. 10, coinciding with votes in other Russian regions, state news agency RIA reported.
TASS, another state news agency, cited election chief Ella Pamfilova as saying that Russia’s Defence Ministry and Federal Security Service (FSB) considered it possible to hold the votes in September.
Russia does not fully control the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in eastern and southern Ukraine and fighting is ongoing in all four regions. The regions are scheduled to elect local governors in September.
Russia declared the regions part of its own territory after hastily conducting what it called referendums in occupied areas of Ukraine last September that Kyiv and the West denounced as illegal and coercive.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Gareth Jones)
