Yevgeny Balitsky, appointed by Russia to head its occupation regime in Zaporizka, has ordered a referendum this fall on joining the Russian Federation. I have not seen Russia’s apologists in the US media acknowledge that this is happening yet, which is always their first line of defense when Russia does something terrible in Ukraine; but when they finally do, I expect the second line of defense to roll out predictably.

The second defense will be to repeat the line that Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Psekov rolled out this morning: that this referendum is actually an initiative of local Ukrainians rather than an imposition of the Russian invaders. If you’ve ever seen the US impose one of its sham “referendums” or “elections” anywhere else you may have noticed that anti-imperialists have always frowned on this, but it’s worth clarifying why.

The anti-imperialist position is that you obviously cannot have a legitimately democratic transfer of power in the middle of a hot war. It is too easy to coerce and intimidate voters, it is too easy to commit fraud, and it is too easy to hide all of this. You can’t do it because the outcome is too likely to be undemocratic, and you also can’t do this because it legitimizes a practice that other imperialist states can easily abuse too. This was a completely uncontroversial point that anti-imperialists made time and time again during the Iraq war; for example, here’s the Marxist publication Workers Action, in 2005, on the country’s recent elections:

A broad alliance of groups and individuals under the name of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress (INFC) called for a boycott of the elections on the grounds that they did not reach even the most basic standards required to constitute free and fair elections. Indeed, it is difficult to see how elections could be free and fair when carried out under foreign military occupation…

Here’s how China’s Communist Party covered it:

Voters, some ululating with joy, others hiding their faces in fear, cast ballots in higher-than-expected numbers…But in parts of the Sunni Arab heartland, where the insurgency has been bloodiest and several parties called for a boycott, polling stations were empty.

Hailing the election as a "resounding success," President Bush said: "By participating in free elections, the Iraqi people have firmly rejected the anti-democratic ideology of the terrorists."

Despite draconian security measures imposed by the U.S.-backed interim government, militants launched a string of attacks to try to torpedo the polls.

On the left, there was zero ambiguity about the illegitimacy of this election. Bombs were going off, men with guns were marching in the streets, international monitors refused to participate because they didn’t want to get kidnapped. President Bush begged everyone to be patient about it, and then after the vote we had a propaganda blitz of Pentagon press releases telling us how well it went. Remember all those neocons who inked their fingers blue for Bush’s 2005 State of the Union address? That’s what it was all about: imperialists telling us that their wartime elections were totally legitimate.

Zaporizka may be east of the Dnieper, but I do not think the case that it would support cessession to Russia in a legitimate referendum is very strong. A majority of voters backed Yanukovych in 2010, but then in 2014 a plurality backed Poroshenko. They flipped hard against him in 2019, but didn’t rally behind Russia-aligned challenger Yuriy Boyko either; instead, like most of the country, they overwhelmingly supported Zelensky with a plurality in the first round and an 87% landslide in the second. Then in 2020 (also like most of the country) Zaporizka handed Zelensky a defeat: 19% of voters supported his Servant of the People party in regional council elections, while 23% backed the pro-Russian Opposition Platform - For Life party. Though we do not yet have reliable local polling on post-invasion Zaporizka, national polling has shown a massive shift in opinion against Russia, and there’s no reason to believe that it would be an exception.

So my read is that public opinion in Zaporizka has proven fluid enough that a backlash against the invasion may very well have neutralized its natural tilt towards Russia. And that while pro-Russian candidates might still be able to win there, there’s no reason whatsoever to assume that votes for leaving Ukraine, in a legitimate referendum, would prevail.

But that’s beside the point: the real problem here is that we’ll never know. The sham referendum is going to proceed, Russia is going to declare that it went well enough, Zaporizka will cecede from Ukraine, and we’ll never know what the people wanted. Even when things calm down. Here’s the thing about coups that a lot of folks on the left don’t like to grapple with: a lot of times, people just come to accept them. They’ll remember they were wronged and they’ll wish it hadn’t happened, but they’ll also decide that they don’t want to go through a war to change the past. A decade from now, a lot of Zaporiskans will probably see Russia’s referendum the way they see the US coup today: as a regime change imposed by an imperial power that grossly violated their basic democratic rights, one that almost certainly changed the course of history — and one that they absolutely do not want to try to fix. Instead of arguing with them when they say this, I hope more anti-imperialists can learn to listen.