Flanked by verbal attacks against the “regime in Kyiv” and the West, the Russian president incorporated the occupied territories in Ukraine into Russia. In a speech on state television, Putin demands that Kyiv stop the fighting immediately and threatens to defend the region by any means necessary.
At a ceremony to annex four Ukrainian regions, Russian President Vladimir Putin described their residents as Russian citizens. “The residents of Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia will forever be our citizens,” Putin said in a speech to the country’s political elite. “People voted for our common future.”
The Ukrainian government, which Putin consistently referred to as the “Kiev regime,” called on the Kremlin chief to immediately stop all hostilities and to recognize the result of the will of the people in the annexed areas. Otherwise Russia will defend itself by any means necessary.
In his speech, Putin again sharply attacked the West. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the decision was made there to cover the world with its dictatorship, Putin said. Russia is not trying to resurrect the Soviet Union. The West, on the other hand, is still looking for ways to weaken Russia. He accused the West of wanting to view Russia as a “colony”.
Putin formally declared the four occupied territories to be Russian territory, citing an alleged will of the people. At the end of his long speech, he sealed the inclusion of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Cherson with his signature. “People have made their choice,” Putin said, referring to mock referendums that the Russian occupiers held in the four regions up until last Tuesday. Accordingly, the Russian occupiers spoke of an allegedly overwhelming approval of the population there for joining Russia.
The mock referendums are not recognized worldwide because they are held in violation of Ukrainian and international laws and without minimum democratic standards. Over the past few days, observers have pointed to numerous cases in which Ukrainian residents of the occupied territories have been forced to vote.
Shortly before the ceremony began, the Kremlin announced that it still had to “clarify” the “exact borders” of two of the four regions. Regarding the Cherson and Zaporizhia regions, “I still have to clarify that, I can’t answer this question at the moment,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Regarding the Russian annexation plans, Peskov said the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk would be recognized by Russia “within the 2014 borders.” Accordingly, the two Ukrainian regions would be annexed in their entirety. Moscow had already recognized the rule of pro-Russian separatists over the regions in February, shortly before the start of the attack on Ukraine. In southern Ukraine, Moscow controls 72 percent of the territory of the Zaporizhia region and 88 percent of the Kherson region, according to the US think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
In eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk, one of the regions Moscow plans to annex, Russian soldiers are “partially surrounded” in the strategically important city of Lyman, according to the local pro-Russian separatist leader. The news from there is “disturbing,” the pro-Russian leader of the eastern Ukrainian region said in online networks. The nearby towns of Jampil and Drobyschewe are “not completely under our control,” Puschilin continued.
Since the beginning of September, Ukraine had already almost completely recaptured the previously Russian-occupied parts of the Kharkiv region in the east of the country. It recently managed to regain control of the Kupyansk railway junction.
