The Kremlin said on Friday that attacks on any part of the strip of Ukraine that President Vladimir Putin is about to annex will be considered aggression against Russia itself, adding that Russia will fight to seize the entirety of Ukrainian territory. from the eastern region of Donbass.
President Vladimir Putin is expected to proclaim the annexation of nearly a fifth of Ukraine on Friday, intensifying his seven-month war and pushing it into an unpredictable new phase.
Moscow is declaring that the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, largely or partially occupied by Russian forces or supported by Russia, are part of Russia.
Asked by reporters whether an attack by Ukraine on territories Russia claims as its land would be considered an attack on Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “It would be nothing else.”
Putin said last week that he was willing to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia’s “territorial integrity”.
Russia is moving to annex the regions after holding what it called referendums in the occupied areas of Ukraine. Western governments and Kiev said the hastily organized votes violated international law and were coercive and totally unrepresentative.
The exact details of Russia’s annexation are unclear, but it appears that Russia is claiming around 109,000 square kilometers (42,000 square miles) of Ukrainian territory, or around 18%, beyond Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
If Russia could establish control over the entire area it claims, Putin would have annexed some 136,000 square kilometers or more than 22% of Ukraine, whose borders Russia recognized in a treaty after the fall of the Soviet Union.
But Russian forces do not control all that territory. Even as Putin prepared to officially announce the start of the annexation, Ukrainian forces surrounded the Russian fortress of Lyman in the northern Donetsk region.
the annexation
While Russia controls almost all of Luhansk, claimed by Russian-backed separatists as the Luhansk People’s Republic, it only controls about 60% of the Donetsk region.
The self-styled separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, backed by Russia, claims the entire Ukrainian province of Donetsk.
Asked what would happen to territory not under Russian control, Peskov said: “It is to be released.”
He said the entire Donetsk region would become part of Russia.
But Peskov was less clear on whether or not Russia would claim all of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, which Putin recognized on Thursday as independent states.
“We will clear everything up today,” Peskov said. Russia currently controls about 70% of the Zaporizhzhia region.
Luhansk and Donetsk, with a combined population of around 6 million before the invasion, are collectively known as Donbass, a Russian-speaking center of coal mining and heavy industry, until their economies were destroyed by fighting from 2014 onwards.
The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was overthrown in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea.
Source: CNN Brasil
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