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The Russian Federation is in the process of conducting sham elections in occupied areas of Ukraine. These so-called elections are taking place nearly one year after the Kremlin staged sham referenda and purported to annex Ukraines Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts, and over nine years after Russia purported to annex Ukraines Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol. The Kremlin hopes these pre-determined, fabricated results will strengthen Russias illegitimate claims to the parts of Ukraine it occupies, but this is nothing more than a propaganda exercise.

Russias actions demonstrate its blatant disregard for UN Charter principles like respect for state sovereignty and territorial integrity, which underpin global security and stability. The United States will never recognize the Russian Federations claims to any of Ukraines sovereign territory, and we remind any individuals who may support Russias sham elections in Ukraine, including by acting as so-called international observers, that they may be subject to sanctions and visa restrictions.

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Russia's Sham Elections in Ukraine's Sovereign Territory - United ... - Department of State

Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced a new security assistance package to support Ukraine's battlefield needs and demonstrate unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine. This package provided through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) includes equipment to augment Ukraine's air defenses, artillery munitions, and other capabilities.

This USAI package highlights the continued U.S. commitment to meeting Ukraine's pressing requirements by committing critical near-term capabilities, while also building the enduring capacity of Ukraine's Armed Forces to defend its territory and deter Russian aggression over the mid and long term.

Unlike Presidential Drawdown authority, which DoD has continued to leverage to deliver equipment to Ukraine from DoD stocks at a historic pace, USAI is an authority under which the United States procures capabilities from industry or partners. This announcement represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional priority capabilities to Ukraine.

The capabilities in this announcement, which totals up to $600 million, include:

The United States will continue to work with its Allies and partners to provide Ukraine with capabilities to meet its immediate battlefield needs and longer-term security assistance requirements.

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Biden Administration Announces Additional Security Assistance for ... - Department of Defense

Russia is coordinating the recruitment of over a hundred Cuban mercenaries for its war effort in Ukraine, according to hacked documents obtained by The Intercept.

Activist hackers known as the Cyber Resistance and allied to the Ukrainian government recently infiltrated the personal email account of a Russian officer in the Western Military District who was involved in the recruitment of Cubans. The stolen data offers rare and previously unseen insight into how Russia operates its pipeline of foreign mercenaries into the Ukraine conflict.

Within the cache of hacked documents are approximately 122 passport scans and images of Cuban nationals, all fighting-aged males, along with a series of Spanish-language enlistment contracts in with a section of the Russian Armed Forces headquartered in the city of Tula, where a military school and airborne soldiers are known to be located.The contracts are templates, not fully executed agreements, but they sketch the incentives Russia appears to be offering foreign fighters.

The contracts promise a one-time cash payment in the amount of 195,000 rubles, about $2,000, for the Cubans signing on to serve in the zone of the special military operation (the Kremlin euphemism for the war in Ukraine) and monthly payments starting at 204,000 rubles per month, or just over $2,000, depending on rank, along with several spousal and family benefits. So far, these types of official Russian military contracts geared toward foreign nationals have mostly been discussed in regional media reports (such as those targeting ethnic Russian men in former Soviet republics, according to the British Ministry of Defence).

One set of images in the hacked documents shows single passports with a hand holding up entry cards into Russia above them, revealing that a group of at least five Cuban men entered the country through Belarus, a key Kremlin ally, on July 1. A little over a month before that arrival date, a senior Belarussian military official made a public show of pledging to train Cuban troops on its territory.

While the hacked documents do not include signed enlistment contracts for the Cubans, some of the Cubans in the array of passport scans were easily found through Facebook profile searches, and some of them openly posted about relocating to Russia and posed in locations around the Tula region. One of them not only updated his Facebook profile with details that he traveled from Santiago de Cuba to Russia in early July, but also posted a flurry of videos with a new Russian passport and in front of tank columns with the trademark Russian Z spray-painted on the sides.

Only weeks ago, that same Cuban man put out a video from the center of Tula in a popular square that was easily geolocated by The Intercept. Similarly, another apparent recruit from Havana posed at an outdoor shopping center in Tula and, in a separate image, with a fresh buzzcut in front of a Pyaterochka market a popular grocery chain in Russia just last week.

Three of the Cubans from the hacked cache also appeared in a Facebook story from early September smiling together, with one of them sporting the famous striped telnyashka undershirt worn by Russian airborne soldiers and paratroopers, the types of soldiers stationed in Tula where the Cubans are suspected of being trained. The aunt of another one of the Cuban nationals posted a birthday photo of her nephew (that matched his passport date of birth) and said that he had been in Russia and alluded to fighting in Ukraine.

Among the many details in the hack of the Russian officers inbox are email exchanges with military accounts and the translators who processed the Cuban passports; images of internal meetings with high-ranking uniformed officers; and an Excel spreadsheet with nearly a hundred recruitment contacts across four of the five official military districts of Russia.

For his part, the hacked Russian officer, Maj. Anton Valentinovich Perevozchikov, did not deny his role in recruiting the Cubans. He instead sent an expletive-laced reply to The Intercept denouncing NATO and declaring, Russia will win.

According to a senior officer in the Ukrainian Armed Forces with direct knowledge of the hacked materials, We can see that a group of Cuban citizens are going to participate in some activities related to the Russian military. He added, Their efforts remain focused on enticing new recruits voluntarily to prevent a fresh wave of mandatory mobilization.

According to the same officer, at the outset of the full-scale war in 2022,amid the massive failures in Russias initial offensives on Kyiv, the Ukrainian military observed that limited numbers of volunteers willing to risk their lives under the leadership of ineffective Russian officers came from abroad. The latest push with Cubans, he added, could be aimed at bolstering the perception that there is international support for Russia, though economics are a factor too.

Its possible that Cuban citizens are being enlisted due to cost considerations as they are simply cheaper, he said. Apart from salaries, the Russian government is obligated to provide additional compensation in cases of injury or death for its citizens. However, this responsibility doesnt extend to Cuban citizens. When you come here for financial gain, your death is your headache.

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz at the Kremlin in Moscow on June 14, 2023.

Since the beginning of the total invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there has been persistent talk that the Kremlin was soliciting the help of global volunteers. While Kyiv has made no secret of having its own International Legion, made up of NATO veterans and volunteers from around the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin has remained mostly tight-lipped on his use of foreign fighters.

That didnt stop early reports swirling of Syrian mercenaries, adept in urban combat from years of sectarian warfare, being enlisted into the Russian war effort, or Pentagon claims of Iranian operatives in Ukraine, and other rumors that soldiers from the Central African Republic (an ally of the Kremlin) were fighting on behalf of Moscow.

But the hacked material, dating from this summer, suggests that Putin and his military apparatus have made real efforts to recruit foreign fighters for a bloody war that is causing mass casualties on both sides. While the Kremlin has often accused the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of hiring foreign mercenaries for its International Legion, the cache illustrates that Russia is also enlisting foreigners from its own allied countries.

On Monday, the Cuban government said it had uncovered a criminal human trafficking network that was ferrying some of its citizens to the Russian war effort and denied Cubas involvement.The Ministry of the Interior detected and is working on the neutralization and dismantling of a human trafficking network that operates from Russia to incorporate Cuban citizens based there, and even some from Cuba, into the military forces that participate in military operations in Ukraine, according to the statement. Cuba has a firm and clear historical position against mercenarism and plays an active role in the United Nations in repudiating that practice.

The Cuban government did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

It is unclear whether Havanas statement on Monday was prompted by the recruitment effort revealed by the hacked documents, or by a report in a Miami newspaper on how Russia had allegedly forced a pair of teenaged Cuban migrants into its military in the Ryazan region, which neighbors Tula.

Emails to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding the apparent channeling of Cuban mercenaries into the war in Ukraine went unanswered.

In September, Russian media reported Cuban immigrants already living in Russia had signed up for the war effort after Putin decreed an easy path to citizenship for foreign nationals who enlisted in the military. But the records from Perevozchikovs inbox show that this group of men was recruited into Russia this year.

While the war in Ukraine has invigorated NATO and spurred on the addition of two new member states, Finland and Sweden, it has also reawakened other geopolitical alliances. Russia and Cuba were strategic allies during the Cold War, when Cuban leader Fidel Castro sent his troops to fight in the Soviet-backed war in Angola.

The two sides have strengthened their bonds since the broader invasion of Ukraine started a year and a half ago.Cuban leaders have time and again sided with Russia and have not publicly denounced the Kremlins actions in Ukraine. Putin, for his part, has refused to rule out deploying troops to the island nation just over 100 miles from the Florida coast.

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Hacked Documents Show Russia Recruits Cuban Mercenaries for ... - The Intercept

In the 560 days since Russia launched its full-scale assault on Ukraine, daily reports produced by the Washington-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War have become some of the most widely cited authorities on the state of the conflict. ISWs maps, which are updated daily to reflect needlepoint changes on the front line, have been used by the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, the Washington Post, and CNN in recent months.

Detailed battlefield updates were once the sole preserve of militaries, intelligence agencies, and embedded journalists. ISWs Ukraine updates underscore how open-source intelligence has drastically changed public understanding of war. The teams analysts, many of whom were not yet out of high school when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, methodically mine the internet on a daily basis to build a near real time picture of the wars progress which has been used by the media, governments, and humanitarian agencies in understanding the wars progress.

It allows people who dont have access to classified information a much deeper understanding of whats happening at a tactical, operational, and strategic level in Ukraine, said retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Robert Sharp, who served as the director of the National Geospatial Intelligence agency, speaking about ISWs work.

ISWs map of the front line, a frayed red line scored across southeastern Ukraine, is made up of thousands of coordinates of Russian and Ukrainian positions, each one painstakingly identified, verified, and continually updated by the ISW team. Beyond the media, their work has been cited by researchers with the demining organization the Halo Trust, U.N aid agencies, and NASA Harvest projects, which seek to calculate the wars impact on global food supplies.

The man behind the map is 26-year-old George Barros, who leads ISWs four-person Geospatial Intelligence Team. Sitting in a spartan office in Washington, D.C., on a Friday afternoon in mid-August, Barros whirls the wheel of his computers mouse, deftly navigating between villages that most Ukrainians, let alone others around the world, likely had never heard of before the war.

The bread and butter of their work is open-source geolocation, a technique brought to prominence by groups such as Bellingcat, which uses context clues from images and footage of the conflicta bend in a river or the markings on a tankto pinpoint when and where an image was taken. Systematized and coupled with other powerful tools, such as NASAs real-time map of global fires and commercially available radar and satellite imagery, the mix has enabled Barross team to build out a sophisticated picture of who controls the terrain in an ever-shifting battle thousands of miles away.

The approach is not without error. The process is not about producing the perfect map every time. Its a process about producing the best map thats possible given the evidence and information thats accessible at the time, Barros said.

The early days of the conflict were the most chaotic as Russian forces advanced rapidly along numerous lines of attack, coming within nine miles of central Kyiv in the early weeks of the war. But as the fighting has concentrated in eastern Ukraine, it has become easier to trace shifts in the front line. The kind of debates that were having, its about not kilometers. The debates are like, whats happening at the hundreds or tens of meters level? Barros said.

While ISWs work has become a go-to source for maps and updates on the conflict, some seasoned military analysts, who declined to speak on the record for this piece, find them to be overly bullish about the performance of the Ukrainian military. They also criticized the medias over-reliance on the institutes battlefield updates, noting that analytical misfires by the young team have ended up being replicated many times over in the press.

In May, following a drone attack on the Kremlin, ISWs daily report speculated that it could have been perpetrated by the Russian authorities as a false flag operation to set the stage for a wider social mobilization around the war effort. In a thread on X, formerly Twitter, Nathan Ruser, an analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said, its irresponsible to throw these largely baseless theories out there knowing how theyll be consumed.

These updates have become incredibly incorporated into the process that media uses to write the first draft of history for this war, wrote Ruser, who did not respond to a request for comment.

Sharp, the former director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, said that the critiques from experts with deep experience in the subject matter are likely valid, but that there is still value in providing detailed updates for those without access to classified government reports. Theres value in being that aggregator, and putting that together. And theyre making it widely available, he said.

The institutes Russia team lead, Mason Clark, is the first to acknowledge that the reports are often based on incomplete data. So much of what we write is a medium confidence assessment, he said, using language borrowed from the intelligence community. Its a running joke on the team that if you [type] Control-F, the most common thing in our updates is, ISW cannot independently confirm this report at this time, he said.

In many ways, Clark shares the frustration of ISWs critics at the way in which the institutes assessments are picked up by the media, often shorn of their carefully worded analytical caveats. We actually published a statement on our methodology back in May, making clear that none of our work should ever be quoted without those probability statements, he said.

One of the teams first major analytic misfires was over the question of whether Russia would invade Ukraine at all. We thought there was no way the Russians were going to invade because they would be moronic to do so, Clark said. We were looking at their force deployments and saying, theres no way the forces deployed in Belarus would be able to capture Kyiv, this is a terrible command structure, theyre going to face long, hard fighting, he said.

The underlying analysis was right: Russian forces were kneecapped by poor planning in the early days of the way. But their ultimate conclusion failed to account for Russian President Vladimir Putins obsession with bringing Ukraine to heel at any cost.

When the invasion began, ISWs Russia team consisted of three people: Barros, Clark, and Kateryna Stepanenko, who graduated college just the year before. What started that day as a quick four-page update spearheaded by Clark on the state of the invasion, as Russian forces streamed across Ukraines borders, has since evolved into an eight-person team and a meticulous production process that runs seven days a week.

The teams day begins around 8 a.m. with collection, sifting through an extensive list of more than 100 online sources, including Twitter and Telegram accounts as well as updates from various parties to the conflict. By lunchtime, the days collection document has grown to 41 pages of color-coded notes on every major dimension of the conflict.

The sense of mission is palpable as the team works in near silence at two neat rows of white desks in ISWs office in central Washington, D.C. One point of levity: The meme wall, which was dominated by pictures of Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose brutality and public outbursts cast him as one of the arch villains of the conflict. A whiteboard keeps track of bets cast as to when Prigozhin would fall out of a window, established months before he died in a plane crash last month.

Aside from their maps, ISWs monitoring and translation into English of key accounts on Telegram, a popular messaging app in Russia and Ukraine, has been some of their most widely cited work. Stepanenko, who originally hails from Ukraine, initially began scouring Telegram for updates on the war to make sure her family in the country were safe. Thats where I noticed we have a big gap in our information, said Stepanenko, who began systematically building a database of Telegram accounts related to the war, collating them by their various ideological affiliations.

With no content moderation in a realm already awash with disinformation, Telegram can be a swamp of speculation and falsehoods. But it nevertheless plays a powerful role in shaping public perceptions of the war and can offer a peek into power struggles within the Russian system.

In Russia, where the media has been tightly muzzled by the Kremlin, hawkish military bloggers such as those active on Telegram have largely remained free to provide some of the most vocal criticism of the wars progress. Russian officials have also been suspected of using the platform to leak information and stir up scandal amid bureaucratic knife fights.

We severely underestimate the power and importance of the information space to Russian officials, Stepanenko said. She summarized her work: I just really like Kremlin drama.

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The Washington Whiz Kids Mapping the War in Ukraine - Foreign Policy

As millions of Russians go to the polls for regional elections that wrap up on Sept. 10, there is little doubt that President Vladimir Putins party, United Russia, will win the vast majority of contests. But the tightly controlled vote will still be interpreted as a test of confidence for the beleaguered strongman, who in late June survived the biggest challenge to his 23 years in power during the Wagner rebellion.

Pressure has been building up on the Kremlin since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has upended the Russian economy, not to mention causing the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers. U.S. officials have estimated that Russias military casualties are approaching 300,000. The war in Ukraine is also increasingly coming home to Russia, including Moscow, with at least 190 suspected drone attacks hitting the country and Russian-occupied Crimea.

In recent years, and especially following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the countrys remaining opposition figures have largely been cowed, exiled, or jailed. Critical media have packed up or been shut down by the Kremlin, and human rights organizations have been disbanded.

There likely wont be the surprises seen in the last round of local elections, in 2018, that saw United Russia lose four gubernatorial races. Even so, the vote remain an important moment for both Putin, who is hoping to shore up his legitimacy within Russia, and for Russias opposition, which is hoping to retain their last toeholds in Russian politics.

The Kremlin is very worried about the outcome of these elections, says Regina Smyth, a professor at Indiana University whose research focuses on Russia.

Below, what to know about the vote.

The elections will take place in about half of Russia, plus the four occupied Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia as well as Russian-annexed Crimea. Over 4,000 contests are being held for a range of positions including governors, mayors, and deputies to the State Duma, the lower house of Russias parliament.

Voters gather to cast their ballots in a street near their apartment building during local elections in Donetsk, the capital of Russian-occupied Donetsk region, in eastern Ukraine, on Sept. 6.

AP

Since Putin became President in 2000, he has increasingly stacked the electoral odds in his favor. Election rules have been changed. Increasingly stringent rules for registering candidates mean that many opposition figures are disqualified from even running for office. The opposition maintains that voter fraud is widespread. Freedom House downgraded Russias rating from Partly Free to Not Free in 2004, a ranking the country has held continuously since then.

The Kremlin will be hoping that Russians who still have faith in the election will learn from the elections that even when you give people a choice, Putin still wins, says Smyth.

Elections are very important for the regimes legitimacy, but any scandals around it, and any thoughts that things are wrong harm this legitimacy, says Stanislav Andreichuk, the co-chair of Golos, an independent Russian vote-monitoring organization that the Kremlin has designated as a foreign agent." On Sept. 8, the first day of voting in Russia, Golos documented over 600 reports of voting irregularities, including vote buying, threats of violence, and blocking people from voting.

While the invasion of Ukraine has dramatically reshaped Russia over the past 18 months, it has rarely been mentioned explicitly on the campaign trail. It is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Voters walk toward members of an electoral commission to receive their ballots at a polling station during local elections held by the Russian-installed authorities in Donetsk, on Sept. 8.

Alexander ErmochenkoReuters

The Kremlins party, United Russia, has advised its candidates to stop talking about the war," says Smyth. She notes that several Kremlin-backed candidates who have closely tied themselves to Russias war efforts have toned down their war rhetoric. For example, Vitaly Khotsenko, the former Prime Minister of the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk who is running as an incumbent for the governorship of Omsk, has largely exchanged extolling the war for talking about education and other local issues.

But experts say that when the war is inextricably tied to some of Russias biggest problems, it is hard to avoid altogether. According to Andras Toth-Czifra, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, veterans issues have been one of the few ways in which the war comes up explicitly.

In a country where you cannot call a war a war, its difficult to talk about it in a political campaign, says Toth-Czifra.

Andreichuk says that politicians who support the war have little to gain by talking about the countrys most divisive issue, while anti-war politicians must avoid voicing their opposition too obviously.

A few pockets of resistance may prevent Putins United Russia from winning a clean sweep in the elections.

The most competitive contest is likely to be for the governorship of Khakassia, a remote Siberian region known for its sweeping steppes and many lakes. Here, the incumbent Communist Partys Valentin Konovalov may win reelection after his Kremlin-backed opponent, Sergei Sokol, dropped out of the race. Sokol announced on Telegram that he was too ill to stand. But Russias opposition largely believes he stood little chance against Konovalov. He was scared to lose the campaign, says Andreichuk.

This shows that there are definite limits to even the Kremlins power in Russia today, says Smyth, especially in regions such as Khakassia that have long been a site of protest.

Yabloko, a long-standing liberal opposition party, is running 216 candidates under the slogan For Peace! across a range of offices. Nikolay Rybakov, Yablokos chairman, said in a statement to TIME that, There are several dozen parties in Russia that support the policies of President Putin. And there is only one partyYablokowhich opposes his policies. During this election cycle, Yablokos candidates have been threatened with violence, had their offices searched by the authorities, and had election materials seized.

Andreichuk, the co-chair of Golos, says that Yabloko candidates rarely go as far as criticizing Russias war effort directly to avoid running afoul of Russias laws about discrediting the military. Such statements would risk up to five years of imprisonment. But running on a pro-peace platform is absolutely incredible for todays Russia, he says.

Russias opposition has encouraged independent-minded Russians to vote for any party but United Russia. Alena Popova, a Russian opposition politician in exile and currently a Public Policy Fellow at the Wilson Center, says, I refuse to use the word election because we have a dictatorship. Even so, she says it is crucial for Russians to vote: Maybe in a few years we will have real elections, but we need to have this habit to vote."

The elections in the occupied areas of Ukraine and in Russian-annexed Crimea are taking place as many of Russias ordinary voting procedures have been suspended and the Kremlins candidates are running virtually unopposed. These areas remain the site of intense fighting as Ukraine seeks to break through Russias defenses.

The Ukrainian government and its Western allies have strongly denounced the elections as illegitimate. Even Russias supporters understand that these are sham elections, and they will not be accepted by any democratic country, says Kira Rudik, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament.

Ukraine has used drones to drop leaflets over occupied towns telling people to refrain from voting. The elections are held to prove to Russian people that Russia will not give up on these territories, says Rudik, who is also leader of the political party Golos, which is unrelated to the election-monitoring group of the same name.

People are forced to go to the voting booth, they are forced to vote, and no matter what happens Russia will still produce an overwhelming victory for Putin, says Rudik. She has a simple message for Ukrainian citizens in the occupied territories: Do whatever is needed to save your life and those of your loved ones. Buy yourself time until the Ukrainian army comes and liberates you.

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What Russia's Regional Elections Mean for Putinand Ukraine - TIME