Election officials went house to house accompanied by armed guards

MOSCOW, Sept 27 (BBC/ Reuters): Tuesday is the final day of a ballot for Russian-held regions of Ukraine which the government in Kyiv and its Western allies dismiss as a sham.
Nearly four million people from the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, are being asked to attend polling stations and vote in so-called referendums on joining Russia.
This follows four days of early voting during which allegations of intimidation multiplied as election officials went house to house accompanied by armed guards.
The votes, called with just a few days' notice, serve a deadly serious purpose as they will be used by the Kremlin to legitimise its invasion aims.
If Russia absorbs these regions, making up about 15% of Ukraine's territory, it could take the war to a new and more dangerous level, with Moscow portraying any attempt by Ukraine to regain them as an attack on its sovereign territory.
There is now speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin may announce the four regions' annexation in a speech to a joint session of Russia's parliament on Friday.
In March 2014 he announced that Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula had been annexed just a few days after a likewise unrecognised referendum was held.
Were the guns there to protect you as you voted, or to cow you into voting? That was a question passing through people's minds in recent days as election officials escorted by soldiers come to knock on their doors.
Serhiy Haidai, the governor-in-exile of Luhansk region, accused the separatist authorities there of taking down the names of people who voted against joining Russia or who refused to vote at all.
"Representatives of the occupation forces are going from apartment to apartment with ballot boxes," he said, quoted by Reuters news agency. "This is a secret ballot, right?"
Talking separately to the Associated Press news agency, he suggested the Russians were using the process as a pretext to search homes for men they could mobilise as soldiers as well as checking for "anything suspicious and pro-Ukrainian".
One woman described for BBC News how her parents had voted in the city of Melitopol in Zaporizhzhia region.

Russia's Medvedev raises spectre of nuclear strike on Ukraine
One of President Vladimir Putin's allies on Tuesday explicitly raised the spectre of a nuclear strike on Ukraine, saying that the US-led military alliance would still stay out of the conflict for fear of a nuclear apocalypse.
Dmitry Medvedev, a former president who now serves as deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said Russia had the right to defend itself with nuclear weapons if it is pushed beyond its limits and that this is "certainly not a bluff".
Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia's first mobilisation since World War Two and backed a plan to annex swathes of Ukraine, warning the West he was not bluffing when he said he'd be ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia.
"Let's imagine that Russia is forced to use the most fearsome weapon against the Ukrainian regime which had committed a large-scale act of aggression that is dangerous for the very existence of our state," Medvedev said in a post on Telegram.