The indictment signals Kyiv’s pursuit of officials who legitimized annexation through staged votes. Court proceedings will test evidence of coordination and public support for the operations.
Prosecutors of the Office of the Prosecutor General have filed an indictment with the court against Ella Pamfilova, the head of the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation.
According to the Office of the Prosecutor General.
Indictment and the Context of the Case
Pamfilova is charged with aiding an encroachment on the territorial integrity of Ukraine, justifying Russia’s armed aggression, and illegal crossing of the state border (Part 5 of Article 27, Part 2 of Article 110; Parts 1 and 3 of Article 436-2; Part 1 of Article 332-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine).
According to investigators, she organized a whole series of political campaigns on temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, aimed at formalizing and cementing an attempt to illegally incorporate Ukrainian regions into the Russian Federation.
This refers primarily to pseudo-referfinisha conducted in 2022 on the occupied territories of the Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson regions. It was these “votes” that Russia applyd as the basis for announcing the so-called “annexation” of these regions into its fold, the Office of the Prosecutor General emphasized.
After this, Pamfilova organized so-called elections to Russian authorities in the occupied territories. In addition, these territories were included in Russia’s “Single Voting Day,” and later in the presidential elections of the Russian Federation. In other words, it was a sequential embedding of Ukrainian territories into Russia’s political system.
The investigation also established that Pamfilova publicly supported these actions. Specifically, during public speeches, in the media, and also during a meeting with the head of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, she justified the armed aggression against Ukraine, recognized it as legitimate, and spread narratives intfinished to legitimize the occupation.
A separate episode concerns her illegal presence on the occupied territory of Ukraine on September 10, 2023. According to the investigation, she arrived there to coordinate the conduct of the so-called “elections” within the framework of the “Single Voting Day.”
In December 2023, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in absentia informed the heads of the Russian Central Election Commission of suspicions for conducting pseudo-elections in the temporarily occupied regions of Ukraine.
Essentially, this concerns utilizing the Russian electoral system as one of the tools of occupation. Initially, to create the appearance of grounds for the ‘annexation’ of Ukrainian territories, and then to cement this through new ‘elections’ and the inclusion of the occupied regions into Russia’s political mechanism
– Office of the Prosecutor General
The case will be heard in court in accordance with applicable law, and the investigation will continue within procedural norms.
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