You say that like you want us to believe those "elections" were free and fair. With occupying troops watching the polls? With occupying troops already ethnically cleansing the provinces by deporting native Ukrainians into "the Russian interior"? What a laugh that would be if it weren't so tragic.
This is the same old playbook Moscow used after WW2, where any opposition in Poland, or Bulgaria, or Romania, or Czechoslovakia was either imprisoned, expelled, or simply murdered until the masses voted as they were told to. The Allies were fooled until 1948. This was the reason NATO was formed in 1949.
And then of course there's the old Stalin jape that goes: "The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do."
I know you will deny it all, but the lurkers and new readers need to know how it was and still is with Russky Mir.
An excellent source book is "Post War" by Tony Judt.
https://www.amazon.com/Postwar-History-Europe-Since-1945/dp/0143037757
BTW - Russkiy Mir means "Russian World". It is the driving philosophy behind Putin. Books I have started reading connect it with the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. Academic philosophical language is almost gibberish to this old engineer, so it's slow going, but it's obvious that the chief exponent today is one Aleksandr Dugin, widely known as "Putin's Brain". Bottom line is that Moscow should control all of Europe and the Middle East. Another main theme is that "The American Empire Must be Destroyed", which with the help of Russian-based hackers, agents provocateurs, and internet "influencers", (such those here on FR), they seem to have made a strong start on their way to doing.