As part of a campaign to encourage secession from the Moscow regime, Russians on Thursday began voting in unsanctioned independence referenda in five regions of the country.
The online voting, organized by the umbrella organization Post-Russia Forum, involves Siberia, the Urals, Kaliningrad, Krasnodar and Ingria.
Referendums are non-binding and may be illegal under the Russian “territorial integrity” law. But on the first voting day, open until February 28, over 130,000 votes were registered.
Stanislav Pavlovsky-Suslov of the Siberian Independent Confederation Committee said he was confident that “yes” would strengthen the campaign.
“The results will allow us to understand whether the inhabitants of Siberia want to … be free from the influence of Moscow,” he said. I.
“Moscow deprives Siberia of many resources and spends money not on the development of Siberia, but on its own needs and aggressive wars,” he said, adding that “Siberia will be free.”
The organizers of the referendum are also planning in several other areas, which they will supplement with “information work” and other tactics. For security reasons, they were unable to provide more details.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, independence movements have intensified in several regions of Russia, with disproportionate deaths in the provinces and the impact of sanctions exacerbating already existing complaints about a lack of autonomy and perceived exploitation.
In May 2022, representatives of the six provinces formed the League of Nations with the aim of “disintegrating the Russian Federation and creating new states on its ruins.”
But while these provinces have long advocated self-determination and in most cases form a single dominant ethnic group, the Post-Russian Forum insists on the independence of larger and more diverse territories without a common identity.
In this context, referendums help to give momentum and normalize the idea of secession, the doctor said. Alexander Etkind, professor of international relations at the Central European University in Vienna.
“These polls have no legal force, but are timely and effective public relations campaigns that promote the project of the future independence of the regions concerned,” he said.
But while Russia’s possible collapse during the war has caught on among foreign policy analysts, there are also fears that attempts to split Russia could lead to bloody conflict and uncertainty about its nuclear arsenal.
Dr. Alexander Motyl, a professor of Russian and Soviet history at Rutgers University in the US, suggests that the internal damage caused by the war in Ukraine could advance that prospect.
“Russia could not, because of[regionalen Unabhängigkeitsbewegungen]will plunge into a civil war, but because Putin’s war will weaken the country and its regime,” he said.
Source: I News
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