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Report on the Vedomosti site says that a new Crimean district of the Russian will be formed out of the occupied regions combined.

It’s still not clear yet if this will include Kherson (which one source from Russia itself is saying was flawed), nor if the limit is for the Russian controlled areas of the other Oblasts.

A curious thing - one source I’ve read, from Moscow no less, says that the votes except in Kherson were all above board - this opens the opportunity for Russia to be pragmatic - the Crimean district CAN’T contain Ukrainian strongholds, not without committing to a very long period of draconian military occupation.

That’s of particular interest with Zaporizhzhia because the Russian controlled area pretty much ends at the south bank of the Dnipro with almost a horizontal line from there to Dnipropetrovsk Oblast marking the divide between Ukrainian held and Russian held. The Uke held area has more than double the population of the rural middle.

Frankly, any Russian attempt to enforce rule over that city without military occupation of it is totally impossible.

It would be very easy for Russia to “withdraw” from all contested rural areas of Kherson and Mikolaiv oblasts on the north side of the river (which aren’t densely populated and would require a manufactured border to maintain), then draw a border from Vasylivka to Ternuvate in Zaporizhzhia.

North of the line could be Ukraine, south of it is Russian controlled.

The alternative is, over 800,000 people in Zaporizhzhia city end up enemies of Russia and fair game for a massive aerial onslaught (even though over a third of them are Russian Ukrainians) just for the right to plant a Russian flag in a city that is nowhere near being under Russian control.

And the referendum numbers just don’t stack up - maybe they allowed 3/11ths of the Oblast population a right to vote, and maybe 2.4/11 of them actually did vote for annexation, but even the Kremlin knows that it’s nowhere near even a technical majority let alone a decisive majority.