UK Prime Minister Liz Truss said that Britain will never recognize the four regions annexed by Russia as “anything other than Ukrainian territory.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sept. 30 presided over an elaborate ceremony in Moscow marking the “accession” of four regions—Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson—to the Russian Federation.
Kyiv and its allies criticized the move, which they say amounts to de facto “annexation” of the territories by Russia.
“The referendums have no legal value,” Mikhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told the Italian press on Sept. 30.
“Under international law, the regions are and remain territories of Ukraine, and Ukraine is ready to do anything to take them back.”
In comments broadcast on live television, Putin said Moscow was ready to return to negotiations with Kyiv, but wouldn’t overturn the results of polls that Russia’s critics say lack legitimacy.
In five days of polling that ended on Sept. 27, the vast majority of voters in the four regions opted to leave Ukraine and join Russia, according to Russian and pro-Russian sources.
“The results are known. The people have made their choice,” Putin said.
“Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia used their right to self-determination, as enshrined by the U.N.”
He went on to voice confidence that Russia’s parliament would swiftly ratify the four regions’ accession to Russia.
Both the United States and European Union have vowed to redouble sanctions on Russia, some of which will reportedly target Russian officials involved in organizing the polling.
Although Western-led sanctions are ostensibly aimed at crippling Russia’s economy, they appear to have failed to damage the ruble, which hit an eight-year high on Sept. 30 against the faltering euro.
Counteroffensive Stalls
After retaking positions in the northeastern Kharkiv region late last month, Ukrainian forces have since run up against much stiffer Russian resistance.According to military experts, seasonal rainfall expected beginning this month will likely hinder the Ukrainian counteroffensive at least for the next several months.
Nevertheless, skirmishes continue along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (about 620-mile) front line, with reports of fierce fighting around the strategic areas of Bakhmut and Lyman in Donetsk.
On Sept. 30, western media reports appeared to suggest that Ukrainian forces had captured Lyman, but this has yet to be substantiated.
In its Sept. 29 daily briefing, the Russian Defense Ministry said that Russian artillery and aircraft had continued to inflict significant losses on Ukrainian manpower and equipment. The Epoch Times was unable to verify the ministry’s assertions.
Kyiv generally doesn’t disclose casualty figures, but one prominent New York newspaper recently interviewed Ukrainian soldiers who described “massive” losses of men and materiel.
Both sides accuse one another of using artillery to target civilian areas.
On Sept. 21, Putin announced the call-up of 300,000 experienced army reservists, many of whom are expected to reinforce areas where fighting is heaviest.
Russian forces and their local allies currently hold about 60 percent of Donetsk and almost all of Luhansk. Together, the two territories comprise the Russian-speaking Donbas region, which has remained the primary focus of Russia’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine, now in its eighth month.
Pro-Russian figures in Donbas say that since 2014, the region’s civilian population has suffered frequent abuses—largely ignored by the Western media—at the hands of the Ukrainian army and paramilitary groups.
Kyiv denies the claims.
Russian forces also currently control broad swaths of the southern Zaporizhzhia region and almost all of neighboring Kherson, which shares a border with the Black Sea region of Crimea.
Moscow has made it clear that, once the four regions are officially incorporated into Russia, attacks on those regions—by Ukrainian forces or others—would be construed as attacks on sovereign Russian territory.
In 2014, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to leave Ukraine and join Russia in a similar referendum. The results of that poll remain unrecognized by all but a handful of countries.
‘State Terrorism’
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, meanwhile, has described the rupture of two strategically vital gas pipelines linking Russia to Northern Europe as an “unprecedented act of state terrorism.” Such an act, Peskov told reporters on Sept. 30, “should not do without a serious international investigation.”Since Sept. 26, a total of four gas leaks have been detected in Russia’s Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. Both pipelines run under the Baltic Sea, linking gas fields in Russia to Germany and to other European energy markets.
Scandinavian seismologists claim to have recorded underwater explosions in areas where the leaks were later found, prompting claims of sabotage by EU leaders.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said that any deliberate disruption of Europe’s energy infrastructure would yield “the strongest possible response.”
According to Russia’s TASS news agency, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (FIS) has said that FIS agents had obtained material indicating “western” involvement in the “attack” on the pipelines.
When asked about the claim on Sept. 30, Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, declined to comment.
A day earlier, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova asserted that NATO member countries had conducted deep-sea exercises in July in areas where the leaks were later discovered.
In his Sept. 30 address, Putin went so far as to accuse the United States of “destroying European energy infrastructure.”
