LONDON Reuters - First partial voting results from four Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine showed majorities of more than 96% in favor of becoming part of Russia after so-called referendums that Kyiv and the West denounced as a sham.
Hastily arranged votes had taken place over five days in the four areas - Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson - that make up about 15% of Ukrainian territory.
Russian-installed officials took ballot boxes from house to house in what Ukraine and the West said was an illegitimate, coercive exercise to create a legal pretext for Russia to annex the four regions.
President Vladimir Putin could then portray any Ukrainian attempt to recapture them as an attack on Russia itself. He said last week he was willing to use nuclear weapons to defend the territorial integrity of Russia.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged the European Union to impose further economic sanctions on Russia to punish it for staging the votes, which he said would not change Ukraine's actions on the battlefield.
The annexation of additional territories would destroy any chance of peace talks, according to Kyiv, seven months after Russia launched its invasion of its neighbor. It says Ukrainians who helped Russia organize the votes will face treason charges.
According to the Russian news agency RIA, the initial counts showed majorities ranging from 96.97% in the Kherson region, based on 14% of the votes, to 98.19% in Zaporizhzhia, based on 18% of the count.
The majorities in the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk were just under 98%, with 14% and 13% of votes tallied.
The scale of the pro-Moscow vote came as no surprise after Ukraine said it was carried out at gunpoint in many cases.
It mirrored a referendum in Crimea after Russia took over the region from Ukraine in 2014, when Crimea's leaders declared a 97% vote to secede from Ukraine and join Russia.
Putin said on Tuesday that the votes were meant to protect people from what he has called the persecution of Russian speakers and ethnic Russians in Ukraine, something that Kyiv has denied.
Saving people in all of the territories where this referendum is being held is at the top of our minds, and the focus of attention of our entire society and country, he said.
Moscow has done a lot in the last few months to Russify areas under its control, including issuing Russian passports and rewriting school curriculums.
The referendums were hurriedly brought forward this month after Ukraine seized the momentum on the battlefield by routing Russian forces in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
If the vote was favorable, the head of the upper house of the Russian parliament, Valentina Matviyenko, said that it could consider the incorporation of the four regions on Oct. 4, three days before Putin's 70th birthday.