KYIV, Ukraine — Much of the population of occupied areas have fled. And mail-in and electronic voting is ostensibly taking place despite the lack of a postal service or even electricity in many towns.
But another aspect of what Moscow’s proxies are calling referendums to join Russia casts particular doubt on the process: voting in the presence of armed soldiers, according to witnesses and Ukrainian officials.
“The so-called referendum is more like an opinion poll under the muzzle of machine guns,” Serhei Haidai, the Ukrainian governor of the eastern Luhansk region, wrote on Telegram on Saturday.
Residents have described an intimidating scene: soldiers with balaclavas covering their faces accompanying poll workers going house-to-house with ballots. The soldiers stand by as the ballots are filled in, leaving little doubt over which box they expect to be checked.
“How can they say voting is voluntary when they came with guns?” Natalia, a resident of a village in Kherson region who asked to be identified only by her first name out of concern for safety, said in a telephone interview Saturday.
Villagers came out to greet the small delegation of two soldiers and three women with a ballot box, she said.
“Some people put ballots in the box,” Natalia said. “What happened to the box afterward, I don’t know.”
Natalia said she asked the soldiers why they were there, and they told her that they were guarding the women. Then she turned to the women.
“I asked, ‘What are you so afraid of that you need to be guarded?’” Natalia said. “They were silent.”
Russian proxies hastily called the referendums in four Ukrainian regions — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizka and Kherson — after the Ukrainian army expelled Russian forces from most of a fifth, Kharkiv, in a stunning counteroffensive earlier this month.
Ukrainian and Western officials have said flatly they would ignore the results of what they consider to be “sham” referendums. They believe that President Vladimir V. Putin’s aim is to ultimately annex those parts of Ukraine — as Russia did with the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 — and then threaten severe responses if Ukraine continues military action on what the Kremlin will consider Russian land.
Another suspected goal is to be able to conscript into the Russian army Ukrainians in occupied areas — forcing them to fight their own countrymen in the war.
Ukraine’s military headquarters said in a statement on Saturday that draft notices had already been handed out in the Zaporizka and Kherson regions of southern Ukraine.
Much of the occupied territory where the referendums are taking place is cut off from the internet and cellphone coverage, or in areas of active military combat — making any independent assessment of ballot distribution or vote counting impossible. Russia claims foreign observers are present, though they do not appear to be from internationally recognized bodies.
“Electoral commissions accompanied by armed soldiers roam the region and continue to hunt voters,” Yurii Sobolevskyi, the first deputy head of the Kherson Regional Council, wrote of the poll workers carrying ballots door-to-door. He said polling stations were empty.
Two surveillance videos from the stairwells of apartment buildings in the Zaporizka region posted online on Saturday by the exiled Ukrainian mayor of the city of Enerhodar, Dmytro Orlyov, showed soldiers gripping guns, walking with women carrying clear plastic boxes of ballots.
“They are entering buildings with weapons,” Mr. Orlyov said in a telephone interview. He said residents had recounted to him scenes of raw intimidation by soldiers. “They bang loudly, they ring the doorbell, they give people a ballot and point with their rifle where to put the mark.”
Oleksandr Starukh, the governor of the Zaporizka region, said Saturday that about three-quarters of the population had fled the area because of fighting, undermining any claim of a legitimate result.
Mr. Starukh also emphasized the impact of armed Russian soldiers in managing the voting.
“It is not difficult to understand what mark people will put under the muzzles of automatic weapons,” he wrote on Telegram.
