Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Volodymyr Zelensky 26 on September signed a decree implementing the decision of the National Security and Defense Council to apply sanctions against 44 individuals who are involved in conducting illegal "elections" to the State Duma of Russia in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
This was reported by the Office of the President of Ukraine.
What is known about sanctions against participants in the illegal "elections"?
The new sanctions package includes 44 individuals. It concerns people who, according to Ukrainian authorities, act in Russia's interests and contribute to the temporary occupation of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia regions, Crimea, and Sevastopol.
Among them are individuals who had already been "elected" as deputies of illegally created Russia-backed local self-government bodies in the occupied territories. The list also includes other representatives of the occupation structures and aides to Russia, including propagandist Irina Kuksenkova and former Ukrainian deputy Yuriy Onyshchuk, who after the occupation of Melitopol began cooperating with the Russian side.
The decree states that the sanctions take effect from the day of its publication. The National Security and Defense Council also tasked informing competent EU and US authorities and other states and raising the issue of introducing similar restrictions.
The Ukrainian authorities emphasize that Russia's "elections" in the temporarily occupied territories do not create legal consequences for them. Kyiv also states that the results of such voting and the documents drawn up within this process have no legal basis.
The norms of international humanitarian law, in particular the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Conventions, require the occupying state to respect the applicable law of the occupied territory. Occupation does not grant any sovereignty. The UN General Assembly has repeatedly affirmed Ukraine's territorial integrity. No "elections", "referendums", or "districts" of this status change that status.
– said Vladyslav Vlasyuk, the presidential envoy for sanctions policy.
According to the Ukrainian side, the conduct of these "elections" was accompanied by falsifications, coercive voting, and manipulation of turnout figures.
Ukraine believes that Russia uses the imitation of the electoral process as one of the mechanisms to consolidate control over the occupied territories. Information about the individuals who participated in conducting such "elections" is planned to be shared with international partners for possible synchronization of sanctions.
Our sanctions, and later the sanctions of our partners, are a proper legal assessment of all these "elections" and of everyone who took part in them,
– Vlasyuk emphasized.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Зеленський увів санкції проти причетних до незаконних "виборів" Росії на ТОТ України". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Channel 24.