Aggressors may organize sham electoral procedures (referendums, elections) under conditions of occupation, absence of freedom of speech, and military pressure. The imitation of democratic processes allows the colonizer to formally legalize the regime or the annexation process, ensuring the legal and political consolidation of control over the territory in the eyes of its own society and the world community.
The formalization of the occupation regime through sham procedures. The officers, terrorized by the massacre, were made to vote for the metropole's preferred candidate: "At the end of this spectacle came the execution of the officers captured in Baturyn, and then the formal election of a new hetman. Under the circumstances, the officers simply confirmed Skoropadsky, presented by Peter"[1][2].
The staging of a sham "all-Ukrainian" congress to give the seizure of power the appearance of popular will. The real All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Kyiv on 17-19 December 1917 did not go the Bolsheviks' way: by the time resolutions were adopted it numbered more than 2,500 delegates, "the Bolsheviks were represented by a mere 150 delegates", and the congress backed the Central Rada[3]. The losers did not accept the outcome. Volodymyr Zatonsky - one of them, later a member of the Kharkiv government - recalled: "having gathered illegally in the trade-union building, the delegates of the congress, all of them Bolsheviks except two or three Left SRs, resolved to declare themselves the plenipotentiary Congress of Soviets of the Country, to elect a Central Executive Committee and a government of Soviet Ukraine and, having moved to Kharkiv, to enter into open struggle against the Central Rada"[4]. The new "congress" convened in a city already occupied by Russian troops: "the day before the congress of soviets opened, the Central Rada's garrison in Kharkiv had been disarmed by the troops of V. Antonov-Ovseenko, whom the Council of People's Commissars had instructed to take Ukraine by force of arms", writes historian Stanislav Kulchytsky[5]. He describes the merger thus: with the regional congress of soviets of the Donets and Kryvyi Rih basins, the newcomers "proclaimed their congress the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets"[5]; historian Vladyslav Verstiuk writes that "an alternative congress of Soviets was hastily staged", at which "200 delegates represented 89 soviets and military-revolutionary committees", while "soviets alone in Ukraine at that moment numbered over 300"[6]. The majority of Ukraine's population stayed outside the hall - delegates from the peasants, notes historian Larysa Yakubova, "were almost absent", and the qualifier "with the participation of peasant deputies" was later scrubbed from the congress's name by Soviet historiography[7]. The assembly declared itself the All-Ukrainian Congress and proclaimed the creation of a Soviet - "supposedly truly popular" - UNR[7].
The staging of a no-alternative "People's Assembly" under the control of occupation troops to give the seizure legal form: "On October 27 in Lviv, the People's Assembly of Western Ukraine of 1939 adopted the Declaration on the reunification of Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR, and on November 1 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR passed the law admitting Western Ukraine, as part of the Ukrainian SSR, into the USSR"[3].
A referendum with a vague formulation to legitimize union control: the ballot of the 17 March 1991 referendum asked voters to endorse "the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics"[8] – even though the content of the "renewed federation" was nowhere defined, while the result was then used as a mandate for a new union treaty.
The manufacturing of an appearance of mass pro-Russian mobilization on the peninsula: behind the "self-defense forces," in whose name the operation was conducted, stood Russian troops, as Putin admitted on 17 April 2014: "behind the backs of Crimea's self-defense forces, our servicemen, of course, stood"[9]. Rally and "volunteer" crowds supplied the picture of a popular impulse whose legal significance the UN rejected[10].