Sky News reports on voting in eastern Ukraine & Crimea:
A European Commission spokesperson said the voting in Russian-held regions represented "another blatant violation of international law".
They added: "The European Union does not, and will never recognize either the holding of these, so-called elections, sham elections, in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine or their results."
So here's a suggestion: sponsor your own referendum in eastern Ukraine and Crimea and then make a big fuss about holding Russia to the results. Surely all these Ukrainian 'separatists' and pro-Ukraine Crimeans would welcome this to clear things up once and for all?
But that's probably not a good idea as the EU does not like referendums, as the pro-EU London4Europe is happy to point out:
https://www.london4europe.co.uk/_the_eu_always_re_runs_referenda_until_it_gets_the_right_answer
The first thing to understand is that the EU does not hold or require referenda. Some member states choose to hold referenda under their own constitutions. But these are not EU referenda. Nor do they bind the EU. The referenda bind the member states which held referenda.
But the EU should be holding referenda - lots of them - since it is a separate supra-governmental organization with its own aims and policies that are essentially nothing to do with the national aims and policies of the member states.
In reality, the EU just assumes all member states agree with it and go ahead with whatever they want - in others word 'opt-in' is assumed while 'opt-out' is seldom a choice that is offered.
In its article London4Europe does not make any distinction between referenda to join or leave the EU or the Euro and referenda to agree with its treaties or policies, it just conveniently lumps them all together. Notably three of these treaty referenda were lost:
Lost with a further referendum soon after
1992 – Denmark – Maastricht Treaty – new referendum 1993
2001 – Ireland – Treaty of Nice – new referendum 2002
2008 – Ireland – Lisbon Treaty - new referendum 2009
Which perhaps why the EU isn't really interested in referenda because the results might be uncomfortable.
The fact that one man - MEP Nigel Farage - managed to get the UK out of the EU with one referendum shows just how fragile the EU really is as a political organization and how powerful a political tool a referendum really is.
The EU is not really interested in confirming that it has any kind of real mandate from a member state's electorate otherwise it would have had referenda on, for example, cutting off Russian energy supplies (something that ending up devastating the German economy), offering Canada associate membership (something that could lead to more tariffs from the USA), and handing Greenland to Trump (militarisation of the Arctic).
And that is the principal problem with the EU: it is not democratic and needs to look at its own behaviour before yapping on about 'sham elections' elsewhere.