Sept. 20—There was more than a little outrage among the Western defenders of “democratic values,” over the decision of the Russian-speaking sections of Ukraine to hold a vote over staying with Ukraine or rejoining Russia. It has been no secret for the last eight years, since a coup in Kiev eliminated the government that they had voted for, that the peoples of South and Eastern Ukraine, by a large majority, resent what Kiev has been doing to them. So, “democratic values,” in the modern “rules-based order,” has a rather wide and flexible application. Today saw outbursts from the Kiev government, NATO, 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.
US 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 US spent $5 billion adjusting Ukraine’s sovereignty.
State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel, in a phone briefing to journalists, offered a version of “sham referendum,” suggesting that any vote significantly above 3% would prove the operation to be a sham. He first explained that Moscow is running the show and it is all illegal. “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 paid for by USAID, run by Kiev’s Internationial Institute of Sociology, and explicitly excluded the precise areas that are planning referenda on Friday. But Patel was on a roll.
The bottom line, amongst these defenders of democratic values, is the complaint, that if those oppressed Russian speakers had any decency, they’d drop the insulting voting garbage and just run a democratic coup.
