Recasting Russia’s armed proxies as democratic mandate-holders—and tutoring them to look like that on an election’s schedule—is an innovation of the Minsk armistice and ensuing negotiations on the status of the occupied territories in Ukraine’s east. Russia had never seriously attempted to sell this approach to Western powers in the other “frozen” (conserved) conflicts. But Moscow wants Western-approved elections to be held in the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” (DPR, LPR).
Having such elections recognized as valid could officially turn the DPR-LPR from products of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine into products of local elections. This could then qualify Russia’s …read more
Source: The Jamestown Foundation
