2022 annexation referendums in Russian‑occupied Ukraine

A cardboard box under armed guard

The image is small and ordinary: a flattened cardboard ballot box, stamped in Cyrillic, resting on a wooden table in a makeshift polling room. Papers are stacked beside it. Through a high, narrow window you can see a battered apartment block and a military vehicle idling on the street. Two town residents stand at the back of the room, half turned away, their faces invisible.

That quiet frame — the administrative formality of a vote set against the visible signs of war — captured the contradiction at the heart of September 2022. The boxes and envelopes were meant to signal legitimacy. The scene outside the window told a different story: territory under occupation, normal civic life ruptured, and choices made beneath the shadow of armed forces.

The votes themselves began on September 23, 2022, in areas of four Ukrainian regions that Russian forces or Moscow-backed authorities controlled. Five days later, occupation officials reported near‑unanimous approval for joining Russia. On September 30, Moscow signed treaties and decrees declaring those regions part of the Russian Federation. But the cardboard box and the vehicle outside remained a better emblem of the reality: a process staged where free choice was impossible.

Lines on a map traced years earlier

To understand why those autumn ballots mattered, you have to trace them back eight years. In 2014 Russia seized Crimea and annexed it, and fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces and Russia‑backed separatists. The self‑declared Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic controlled swaths of territory for years. Those fractures did not heal; they widened.

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full‑scale invasion. In the months that followed, Russian forces pushed into southern and eastern Ukraine, occupying new ground in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts and expanding their hold in Donetsk and Luhansk. Military control, however, did not translate into civic consent. Instead, it created the conditions under which Moscow would attempt to rewrite borders with the language of ballots.

The referendums were not a spontaneous gesture of popular will. They were political instruments. Russian and occupation authorities announced plans in August and early September, reshuffling local administrations, moving security resources into place, and setting the stage for a short, tightly controlled voting period. Where ballots were cast, polling stations were often makeshift; voting took place under armed guard, with mobile ballot boxes and remote options reported in some areas. Independent international observers were absent. Large numbers of residents had fled, many eligible voters were not present, and civil society and independent media had been curtailed.

A five‑day vote in a war zone

From September 23 to 27, 2022, occupation authorities opened polling stations and announced remote voting options. Official communications emphasized normal procedure: polling sites, inked fingers, ballot boxes, results transmitted to local election commissions. For those on the ground, the experience was different.

In many towns, military checkpoints controlled movement. Reports from human rights groups documented intimidation, arbitrary detention of dissenters, and pressure on officials to cooperate. In some places officials issued Russian passports, and in others people described fears that refusing to participate could attract retaliation. With independent monitoring barred, there was no credible verification that votes were cast freely or that the counts reflected any genuine public mandate.

When occupation authorities released results, they announced overwhelming "yes" tallies. State media in Russia amplified those figures; Moscow treated them as a legal foundation for claims of sovereignty. International election observation bodies such as the OSCE/ODIHR did not validate the process, and major democracies and international organizations publicly rejected the ballot outcomes as a sham. The mechanics of voting — pre‑prepared lists, mobile ballot boxes, and online voting in stressed circumstances — left many questions about who voted, under what pressures, and how results were tabulated.

Decrees signed in Moscow, maps redrawn on paper

On September 30, 2022, a week after the votes began, the Russian president signed treaties and decrees incorporating the four regions into the Russian Federation. Moscow announced that these oblasts — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — were newly joined federal subjects. The declarations were formal, performed with ceremony and legal language designed to project permanence.

On paper, borders changed. In practice, the ground remained contested. Ukraine never accepted the claims. Most of the world — the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, NATO and scores of other states — refused to recognize the annexations. The UN General Assembly would go on, on October 12, 2022, to adopt a resolution demanding non‑recognition and calling on Russia to withdraw; the vote passed by a large majority.

The Russian moves were consequential not because the ballots were any more valid than the boxes they used, but because they offered Moscow a legal pretext — however feeble — to treat the territories as Russian, to assert that they were defending Russian soil, and to justify further measures, including mobilization and integration efforts in the occupied zones.

A war that would not wait for verdicts

The annexation declarations did not create the fighting — they came as the war was already raging — but they altered its political stakes. Moscow’s rhetoric that the newly claimed regions were Russian territory invited escalation. It framed Ukrainian counterattacks as assaults on Russia itself and was used to justify intensified military measures.

On the battlefield, the map continued to move. In late September and early October, a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northeast drove Russian forces back in parts of the Kharkiv region. Most dramatically, Ukrainian forces liberated the city of Kherson and reclaimed much of Kherson Oblast in November 2022. Those military reversals exposed the central absurdity of the annexation claims: the lines Moscow drew in decrees were not mirrored by uncontested Russian control on the ground.

At the same time, front lines in Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia remained fluid and fiercely contested through 2023 and into 2024. The territory Moscow claimed on paper was a patchwork of occupied cities, active battlefields and contested towns.

The international ripples and the human toll

Legally, the referendums and annexation declarations were widely judged unlawful. Annexation by force contravenes the UN Charter, and the circumstances under which the votes were held — military occupation, no independent observers, mass displacement — made any claim of legitimacy hollow to most of the world. Diplomatic fallout was swift: sanctions intensified, financial and trade restrictions multiplied, and Russia’s political isolation deepened.

Those macro moves had human consequences. The referendums were political acts embedded in a larger campaign that caused widespread casualties, displacement and destruction across the contested oblasts. Many communities were fractured; families were split between those who stayed and those who fled. Human rights organizations documented alleged abuses in the months surrounding the votes: harassment of dissenters, coerced voting, restrictions on movement, and reports of forced transfers and deportations. Investigations by international bodies — including the International Criminal Court and UN mechanisms — continued to pursue allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity tied to the occupation and forcible transfers.

For residents in occupied towns, the annexation meant administrative pressure as well: efforts to integrate local institutions into Russian systems, issuance of Russian passports in some areas, and legal changes intended to align local life with Moscow’s framework — often implemented with little consent and amid reports of coercion.

The slender circle of recognition

Most states and international organizations treated the votes as illegitimate. Only a very small number of countries offered recognition or endorsement of Russia’s claims publicly. The overwhelming majority of UN member states reaffirmed Ukraine’s territorial integrity and refused to accept the annexations as valid. That diplomatic posture had practical effects: it constrained formal economic ties, diplomatic interactions, and access to institutions, and it underpinned the sanctions regimes that targeted Russian banks, individuals and sectors of the economy.

Those sanctions and the political isolation of Russia did not instantly change the map on the ground. But they reshaped the strategic environment: increased military and economic assistance flowed to Ukraine, and Western governments tightened cooperation in intelligence, arms deliveries and training. The votes, in other words, hardened foreign resolve rather than blunting it.

What the ballots did not settle

Two months of headlines and a stack of decrees did not settle the central questions. The referendums offered Moscow a narrative tool and a legal fig leaf; they did not create a lasting settlement. Control of territory continued to depend on fighting. The legal status of the territories remained disputed — recognized by Moscow, rejected by most of the world — and their future hinged on military developments, diplomacy and the outcome of ongoing legal inquiries.

Many specifics about the votes remain murky because independent verification was blocked. Who had access to the polls? How many people eligible to vote were present? How were results tallied? These are not questions with neat answers in a context where administrators, security forces and populations all lived under duress.

The human story remains the most unresolved. For the people of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — those who stayed and those who fled — the ballots were less about constitutional law and more about daily survival: whether a relative could leave, whether a home would stand, whether a child could go to school, whether a neighbor would be detained for speaking out. The cardboard boxes and the decrees changed the legal framing, but they did not close wounds or restore what had been lost.

What endures in the map of this moment

The September 2022 referendums and the September 30 declarations are a chapter in a longer story of territorial claims, forceful occupation and international resistance. They reveal how state actors can try to use the trappings of democracy — polling stations, counted ballots, proclamations — to give weight to actions that international law and global opinion reject. They also show how, in modern war, symbols and ceremonies matter: a signed treaty can try to fix a new border even as tanks and troops redraw it in the days that follow.

In the years after those ballots, the world has moved on in some ways and remained stuck in others. Diplomatic condemnations, sanctions and legal probes persist alongside ongoing fighting, reconstruction needs and humanitarian crises. The referendums did not create a settled peace. They hardened positions, altered calculations and left a slim, ambiguous claim on maps that most countries continue to refuse to acknowledge.

The image returns once more: that modest cardboard box on a plain table, the tricolor cloth draped at the edge, the military vehicle visible through glass. It is both a record and a reminder — that even when officials use ballots to try to make borders seem inevitable, the true measure of sovereignty is the lived reality of people on the ground, and that reality often resists the tidy lines drawn in halls of power.