Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has pledged to liberate the entire country, as Russia pressed on with its supposed referendum in the occupied areas of Ukraine and so-called election workers accompanied by masked gunmen knocked on doors to get people to vote.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine's armed forces would throw Russian forces out and retaliate against every strike of the aggressor. Zelenskiy pledged that Ukraine's armed forces would regain control of the southern Kherson region and eastern Donbas, which includes Luhansk province and Crimea.
Every murderer and torturer will be brought to justice for what he did against Ukrainians, he said.
Reports posted on Telegram groups from occupied areas show that the local population has overwhelmingly boycotted the Kremlin's referendum stunt, which began on Friday. The process ends on Tuesday and Vladimir Putin is expected to declare that these territories belong to Russia this week.
On Sunday, locals described a shambolic voting process that was largely staged for Russian state television. Two soldiers with assault rifles stood nearby, while officials went from house to house, fumbling with intercoms. Most of the residents refused to open their doors.
A resident in the southern seaside village of Stanislav walked with two Russian service personnel, collecting signatures. Some Russian citizens are bussed in from Crimea and smiling for the cameras as they take part in the vote. A number of elderly Ukrainians have participated, according to social media reports.
The Ukrainian governor of Luhansk province, Serhiy Haidai, dismissed the exercise as a farce. He said those who took part in the poll voted in the open. Anyone who ticked the no box on the union with Russia was marked in a notebook and added to a list of the untrustworthy he said. In some cases, armed men slashed down doors.
Haidai said Moscow had inflated the turnout figures in cities that were now almost empty because of fighting. They include Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk and Rubizhne, which the Russian army pulverised and then seized over the summer. He said the turnout was put at 41% -- 46% despite the fact that tens of thousands of people have fled.
The Kremlin postponed plans for a referendum because of a lack of support, but they were revived last week in the wake of a series of Russian military disasters. Earlier this month, Ukraine's armed forces recaptured almost all of Kharkiv oblast, and they are pushing forward toward the southern city of Kherson, which has been occupied since March.
On Wednesday, Putin declared a partial mobilisation of up to 1 million soldiers. The announcement sparked protests in Moscow and St Petersburg, and violent scuffles on Sunday with police in Dagestan, a multi-ethnic republic in the North Caucasus. Video showed people firing in the air as crowds demanded the release of relatives who had been conscripted.
More than 2,000 people have been arrested in Russia for protesting against the draft, according to OVD-Info, an independent monitoring group. Many military men of military age have been crossing into Georgia or Finland in an attempt to avoid Russia's first mobilisation since World War II.
Fighting continued in Ukraine. A former Ukrainian deputy who collaborated with Moscow, Oleksii Zhuravko, was killed in Kherson, along with one other person, according to Russian media sources. A missile strike destroyed a hotel where Zhuravko had been holding a meeting, it was reported. Moscow has been using Iranian-supplied kamikaze drones, according to the military administration in the Black Sea port of Odesa. Serhii Bratchuk, a spokesman for the region, said the city centre was hit three times, with no casualties. One Russian drone was shot down. Ukraine s southern command claimed to have killed 57 Russian troops and destroyed 30 pieces of equipment.