IIn the regions of Ukraine held by Russian troops, five-day “referendums” on the annexation of the respective areas to Russia are due to end on Tuesday. In it, the residents should vote “yes” or “no” on “joining the Russian Federation”. The occupiers had also invited international “observers” to upgrade the votes.
One of them is the managing director of the Hessian utility Energie Waldeck-Frankenberg (EWF), Stefan Schaller. As the district announced on its website, the responsible bodies should decide on Monday whether to release Schaller from work. The committee members – with the exception of the representative of the AfD – spoke out in favor of it on Saturday, it says there.
Videos from the occupied territories distributed by the Ukrainian media showed election workers with mobile ballot boxes going door to door to collect votes, accompanied by an armed soldier. The Ukrainian governor of the largely occupied Luhansk region, Serhiy Hajday, wrote that the forced voting at home or on the street was more reminiscent of a “vote at gunpoint”.
Iranian drones in Russian use
Meanwhile, according to Kiev, there was fighting on many sections of the 1,300-kilometer front line. According to the Ukrainian military on Sunday, Russian forces launched dozens of rocket and air strikes on civilian and military targets within 24 hours; A new armament of the Russians are therefore kamikaze drones bought in Iran, which were used, among other things, over the city of Odessa.
According to Russian media, former Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Zhuravko was killed in a Ukrainian rocket attack on a hotel in the occupied city of Kherson. He had lived in Russia from 2015 and was suspected of anti-constitutional and terrorist activities by Ukraine. Shurawko had advertised in a video for participation in the “referendum”.
Ukraine hopes for anti-aircraft defenses from Israel
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, expressed his incomprehension at the lack of arms deliveries to his country from Israel. This “shocked” him, he said in an interview with French journalists published on Saturday. “I don’t understand why they couldn’t give us air defense systems,” the president said. He indicated that the official reason given by his Israeli interlocutors – that Israel needed the batteries for its own defense – was not true. Other countries would also have received the “Iron Dome” system.
Both countries maintain close ties. Since the spring, Israel has taken in several thousand mostly Jewish Ukrainians and provided humanitarian aid. Meanwhile, according to Israeli media reports, Ukraine had already made efforts in the summer of 2021 to preserve the Israeli “Iron Dome” missile defense system, which is effective against short-range missiles. However, the government in Jerusalem turned down the request because they did not want to strain their relations with Moscow.
After the Russian invasion at the end of February, Israel’s position became even more precarious. The government struggled for weeks to take a clear position on the war of aggression and has so far not followed the international sanctions. Due to the Russian military presence in Syria, Israel is de facto dependent on Moscow’s approval if it wants to take action against pro-Iranian forces there. Moscow has indirectly pointed out this connection again and again.
Zelenskyy also alluded to this when he said in the interview that he understood that Israel “is in a difficult situation with regard to the situation with Syria and Russia”. He doesn’t blame the country, he added. He is merely stating the facts. “My talks with the Israeli leadership have done nothing to help Ukraine.”
