There is something almost administrative about the way Russia has chosen to consolidate its conquest of eastern and southern Ukraine. Tanks and missiles did the initial work; now come the ballot boxes. Russia is holding parliamentary elections in Ukrainian territories it illegally annexed after its 2022 invasion, the first such vote held in these contested regions since occupation began. The exercise is designed to project permanence, to tell the world and perhaps Russians themselves that what began as conquest has matured into governance.

It should fool no one. Ukraine and most of the international community do not recognize the annexations, and an election conducted at gunpoint, in territory emptied of dissenters and flooded with occupying authority, carries no more legitimacy than the referendum Russia staged in Crimea in March 2014, which followed the same logic: seize first, ratify later. That earlier annexation, the first time since World War II that a European state had annexed part of another, was widely described as the opening act of a new and more dangerous era in European security, one some historians now call a second Cold War. The 2022 invasion and this month's parliamentary vote are not a new chapter so much as the sequel nobody wanted.

A Century of Voting at Gunpoint

What makes the current moment worth pausing on is not its novelty but its familiarity. States that seize territory by force have long understood that conquest alone is fragile; it needs the varnish of consent to survive scrutiny and to outlast the attention span of the international community. The historical record is thick with examples, and it is not comforting.

Consider Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. Vienna had administered the province since 1878, but formal annexation was a deliberate escalation, orchestrated by Foreign Minister Aehrenthal and backed by Germany, which bluntly told Russia to accept the fait accompli or face consequences. Russia, still reeling from its 1905 defeat by Japan, had no real choice but to comply. Historians have since observed that the crisis of 1908-09 effectively built the diplomatic landscape that made the First World War possible five years later. Annexation did not resolve the Balkan question; it hardened it into a grievance that detonated in 1914.

Or consider the Anschluss of March 1938, when Germany absorbed Austria. The union was legitimized after the fact through a plebiscite, but the plebiscite followed the collapse of Austrian resistance, the resignation of Chancellor Schuschnigg, and the installation of a Nazi sympathizer as head of government, all engineered under direct German pressure. The vote was theater performed after the outcome had already been decided by force. Anti-Semitic violence in Vienna in the days that followed revealed exactly what kind of consent had actually been obtained.

Indonesia's annexation of East Timor in 1975 followed a similar arc, though with a crueler body count. East Timor declared independence from Portugal, and Indonesia invaded within weeks, eventually killing an estimated 100,000 people, roughly one-sixth of the population, and detaining 300,000 more. The United Nations and the European Community condemned the annexation, but East Timor was judged too small and strategically unimportant to warrant real sanctions, and the United States actively defended Indonesia's position for over two decades. It took until 1999, when a UN-organized referendum finally recorded 80 percent support for independence, and until 2002 for East Timor to become genuinely free. The lesson there is double-edged: illegitimate annexation can persist for a generation, but it is not necessarily permanent.

Why the Vote Matters More Than It Should

Skeptics might reasonably ask why any of this deserves attention. If nobody recognizes the annexation, why does the choreography of an election matter? The answer is that these performances are not really aimed at foreign governments. They are aimed at exhaustion, at the slow erosion of the international community's willingness to keep treating a territorial dispute as unresolved. Russia does not need Washington or Brussels to recognize its parliamentary vote. It needs time, and it needs the vote to become one more fact that grinds down the appetite for confrontation.

This is precisely the dynamic that played out with the Geneva Accords of 1954, which divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel with a promise of reunification elections in 1956. Those elections never happened, because Ngo Dinh Diem, backed by the United States, understood he would lose to Ho Chi Minh and simply refused to hold them. What was meant as a temporary arrangement solidified into a permanent partition, and the world spent the next two decades absorbing the consequences of that unresolved status. Delay and de facto control, backed by a refusal to submit to a genuine vote, can be just as effective as outright annexation.

Angola offers a related but distinct warning. The 1991 Lisbon Peace Accords produced a ceasefire and genuine multiparty elections in September 1992, won by the MPLA. But Jonas Savimbi's UNITA rejected the results and returned to war, plunging the country back into conflict that by January 1994 had produced 3.3 million refugees and a thousand deaths a day. Elections, even reasonably free ones, do not automatically produce peace if the losing side, or the aggrieved outside power, refuses to accept the outcome. Legitimacy is not self-executing; it depends on all parties agreeing to be bound by the result, which is exactly what an occupying power's stage-managed vote is designed to avoid ever testing.

The Difference This Time

There is a case for saying the current war departs from these precedents in one important respect: the speed and coordination of the international response. Western sanctions followed the Crimean annexation within weeks in 2014, and a far larger sanctions regime followed the 2022 invasion, alongside sustained military and financial support for Ukraine that no comparable victim state, not Bosnia's neighbors in 1908, not Austria in 1938, not East Timor in 1975, ever received. The UN General Assembly, unlike its toothless League of Nations predecessor, does not require unanimity and has repeatedly passed resolutions condemning the invasion by lopsided majorities, a structural advantage the interwar League never possessed when it needed to act against Japan in Manchuria or Italy in Abyssinia.

Yet structural advantage is not the same as decisive outcome. Kyiv residents are enduring intensified missile bombardment with only a four-minute warning window, an assault that has grown more frequent and more punishing even as diplomatic condemnation of the occupation elections rolls in on schedule. This is the uncomfortable truth history keeps offering: moral and legal censure, however righteous, has rarely by itself reversed an annexation already consolidated on the ground. Bosnia-Herzegovina stayed under Austro-Hungarian control until the empire itself collapsed in 1918. East Timor waited twenty-four years. Crimea, eleven years on, remains occupied.

None of this means resistance or nonrecognition is futile. It means it is slow, and that the ballot box, when wielded by an occupier rather than offered to the occupied, is not evidence of legitimacy but a confession of its absence. Russia is not asking Ukrainians in Luhansk or Melitopol what they want; it is telling the world what it has already decided. The historical pattern is consistent enough to trust: annexation dressed as democracy eventually gets remembered as neither. But "eventually" has, in case after case, meant years or decades of suffering before the record gets corrected. The people sheltering through four-minute warnings in Kyiv do not have the luxury of waiting for history's slow verdict.