Despite international objections and threats, the Russian President signed Vladimir Putin On Thursday, a decree declared the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhia to be independent.
According to the information, the new Russian decree paves the way for the official annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhia to Russia, as it stated, as the Kremlin announced, that Putin recognized Kherson and Zaporizhia as independent regions.
The move is a necessary intermediary before Putin can go ahead with his plans to declare on Friday that the two regions are part of Russia.
This came a week after Moscow announced that Russia will officially annex 4 Ukrainian regions controlled by its forces during a major ceremony to be held in Moscow on Friday.
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said the annexation process would be made official at a ceremony in the Kremlin.
He also confirmed at the time that the Russian president would deliver an important speech during the occasion.
to Crimea
These developments came after the leaders of the four regions appointed by the Kremlin met in the Russian capital, Thursday, a day after the pro-Moscow authorities appealed directly to Putin to annex the territories to Russia.
Their requests to the Kremlin, which were issued almost simultaneously, came after the four regions announced that their residents unanimously supported the move, in the framework of hastily organized referendums that Kyiv and the West considered illegal, fraudulent and invalid.
It is noteworthy that the four regions, Kherson and Zaporizhia in the south, Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, constitute an important land corridor between Russia and Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014.
The five regions together represent about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory, while government forces have recaptured several sites for weeks.