At Putin's invitation

“Election observers” dine on caviar in eastern Ukraine

Critics say: In Russia, an election takes place without an election.

(Bild: AFP)

The Kremlin's propaganda machine is running at full speed. Russian state television has shown supposed Western election observers at work - eating caviar and in a good mood. However, these are selected people and not OSCE officials.

The Pervy Kanal filmed a delegation from Italy that was getting a picture in the Luhansk region. In the Zaporizhzhya region, which is also occupied, the French journalist Lucien Cerise said that he did not trust the reports in the Western media and wanted to see for himself.

According to Russian parliamentary speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, 475 observers from 89 countries were deployed to monitor the vote. This number is considered to be very low in order to be able to monitor a ballot in the world's largest country in terms of area with eleven time zones in a truly comprehensible manner.

OSCE excluded
The independent observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), whose monitoring is considered the international standard, were not even invited by the Russian side.

"If Putin had nothing to hide, he would at least allow transparency here," Ewa Ernst-Dziedzic, foreign policy spokesperson for the Greens, recently told krone.at. The OSCE election observer has serious doubts about the legitimacy of the results: "People are allowed to go to the polls, but the elimination of all opposition in recent years, repression of dissenters, the total control of the media space by the incumbent authorities and the consistent violation of freedom of expression, association and assembly cast doubt on whether these elections should be regarded as such and be called that."

Caviar for election observers
Russian state television showed the foreign observers, who were treated to caviar and other Russian specialities, making exclusively positive comments about the organization of the election.

People in the occupied Ukrainian regions of Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhia also smiled into the state television cameras and expressed their happiness at being able to take part in the Russian presidential election for the first time. They emphasized that they were not afraid and firmly believed in Moscow's victory in the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, which has been going on for more than two years.

Putin is omnipresent in Donetsk.

(Bild: AFP)

The three-day vote ends on Sunday evening with the closing of the last polling stations at 7 pm CET in Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg) on the Baltic Sea. After that, there will be direct forecasts on the outcome of the election, which are based on voter surveys conducted after the votes have been cast and are generally largely in line with the result.