In occupied Mariupol, Russian invaders hold a sham election

EARLY VOTING in Mariupol began on March 10th, courtesy of armed election brigades who criss-crossed the city in search of participants. Sometimes, mobile were unveiled to the sounds of rousing hits such as Sergei Voitenko’s “My Russia” (Russia! Russia! My Russia! / Great country! Motherland!). Other times, guns did the talking. Those preferring to wait until the official start had a harder job. The locations of polling booths were not advertised ahead of the vote—a provision, officials explained, designed to ensure the safety of organisers. By the time polls closed on the evening of March 15th, the first of the three official ballot days, a stratospheric 69% of the region had already voted. This was all the more remarkable given the absence of accurate voting lists to calculate the number from.The vote in Mariupol could be written off as a farce, were it not for everything that went before it. The second day of voting came exactly two years after Russian planes dropped bombs on the city’s main theatre while a large number of children were taking shelter inside, killing hundreds of them. Local authorities estimate that at least 22,000 civilians were killed in the city during weeks of bombardment. It may be considerably more. Only 120,000 of a pre-war population of 450,000 remain in Mariupol, plus a similar number of new migrants from Russia and central Asia.