Theoretically, the secession of territories (Crimea to the South and Donbass to the East) might be other tokens to justify the classification of Ukraine as an anocracy. However, in both cases, Russia has been found to have been supporting the separatist groups. The contested 2014 Crimean status referendum led to international condemnation, and public opinion might have been skewed by propaganda in Russian media, which dominated the peninsula's media landscape, as well as temporary vacuum of the central power after Yanukovych had fled the country. Although the same has been attempted in the rest of Southeastern Ukraine (such as in Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson, and Dnipro), but it succeeded only in the extreme southeast, in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and would have been inevitably ended without both open and implicit Russian intervention and military aid.