Putin says Russia will defend newly annexed regions by ‘all available means’
Russian President Vladimir Putin opened a Kremlin ceremony Friday to start the process of absorbing parts of Ukraine into Russia by saying he would sign laws to annex them despite international condemnation and protect the newly incorporated regions using “all available means.”
“The United States will never — never, never — recognize Russia’s claims on Ukraine sovereign territory,” President Joe Biden, said in Washington on Thursday, addressing U.S. Pacific Island Country Summit. He added that the so-called referendum was “a sham” with results “manufactured in Moscow.” The Kremlin-organized votes in Ukraine and the nuclear warning are an attempt by Putin to avoid more defeats in Ukraine that could threaten his 22-year rule.
Retaking it could open the path for Ukraine to push deep into one of the regions Russia is absorbing, a move widely condemned as illegal that opens a dangerous new phase of the seven-month war. The annexations are Russia’s attempt to set its gains in stone, at least on paper, and scare Ukraine and its Western backers with the prospect of an increasingly escalatory conflict unless they back down — which they show no signs of doing. The Kremlin paved the way for the land-grabs with “referendums,” sometimes at gunpoint, that Ukraine and Western powers universally dismissed as rigged shams.
Luhansk and Donetsk – wracked by fighting since separatists there declared independence in 2014 – form the wider Donbas region of eastern Ukraine that Putin has long vowed, but so far failed, to make completely Russian. Peskov said that both Donetsk and Luhansk will be incorporated Friday into Russia in their entirety.
Russian-installed officials in Zaporizhzhia blamed Ukrainian forces for the strike, but provided no evidence. Putin also issued decrees recognizing the supposed independence of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, steps he previously took in February for Luhansk and Donetsk and earlier for Crimea, seized from Ukraine in 2014.
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