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 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'At gunpoint' 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 referendums 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. Two local "collaborators" had arrived with two Russian soldiers at their flat to give them a ballot paper to sign, she said. "My dad put 'no' [to joining Russia]," the woman said. "My mum stood nearby, and asked what would happen for putting 'no'. They said, 'Nothing'. Mum is now worried that the Russians will persecute them." Another woman in the embattled town of Enerhodar, where the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station is located, told the BBC: "You have to answer verbally and the soldier marks the answer on the sheet and keeps it." Ukrainian journalist Maxim Eristavi tweeted to say that his family had been "forced to vote at gunpoint" in southern Ukraine. "They come to your house," he wrote. "You have to openly tick the box for being annexed by Russia (or for staying with Ukraine if you feel suicidal). All while armed gunmen watch you." Petro Kobernik, who left Kherson just before the referendum began, told AP in an interview by phone: "The situation is changing rapidly, and people fear that they will be hurt either by the Russian military, or Ukrainian guerrillas and the advancing Ukrainian troops."