President Vladimir Putin will sign documents on Friday proclaiming Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions.
The signing ceremony for the documents, which the Kremlin is calling “accession treaties,”is set to take place in the Grand Kremlin Palace, and marks Putin’s attempt to annex the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, even though Russia does not control them politically or militarily, according to the Washington Post.
Putin’s land grab, which is a blatant violation of international law, will further isolate Russia, triggering new Western sanctions. and without a doubt, the full ramifications of Putin’s annexation declaration are difficult to predict.
Russia held fake referendums – some at gunpoint in the four regions that make up 15 percent of Ukraine’s territory over the last week in order to claim a mandate for the territorial claims.
Putin claims that Russia will use any means to defend the new territories, indicating that he would be willing to resort to a nuclear strike in order to stop Ukraine’s efforts to liberate its sovereign territory.
While Putin insists that the new territories are soon to be part of Russia, the move is in defiance of stern international warnings including from President Biden, and potentially slams the door to any meaningful diplomacy for years to come.
Additionally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky summoned his security and defense chiefs for an emergency meeting to also be held on Friday. Zelensky promises a “robust response.”
The votes “are worthless and do not change reality. The territorial integrity of Ukraine will be restored. And our reaction to the recognition of the results by Russia will be very harsh,” Zelensky said in a statement, reports Reuters.
Washington and the European Union are set to impose additional sanctions on Russia over the annexation plan, and even some of Russia’s close traditional allies, such as Serbia and Kazakhstan, say they will not recognize the move.
The bottom line is that Russian government officials have said that the four regions will fall under Moscow’s nuclear umbrella once they have been formally incorporated into Russia.
That formality will take place when the upper house of the Russian parliament could consider the incorporation of the four regions on October 4, three days before Putin’s 70th birthday.
Putin’s decision is believed to be an attempt to halt a Ukrainian counterattack that has forced Russia to retreat from much of the Kharkiv region and is now threatening to retake more territory in Donetsk. The Guardian is reporting that he hopes that the threat of all-out war and a nuclear retaliation will reduce western support for the Ukrainian offensive.
Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist, wrote that after annexation, the “Russian Federation as we knew it will pass into a new phase of its existence, having become a state with a delegitimized border, including fragments that not only won’t be recognized by any state or international organization de jure but won’t be controlled by its central administration de facto.”
