Annexation

According to Vladimir Putin 4 regions of eastern Ukraine don’t want to be Ukrainians, in fact the people see themselves as Russians. And on September 27, Putin declared that a referendum conducted in those regions led to an overwhelming vote calling for separation from Ukraine. Putin announced that Russia had annexed Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson Oblasts. Putin said that the residents of the four regions would become Russia’s citizens “forever.” The Kremlin claims that 100% of the people living in the occupied territories voted to join Russia.

100%! Really? This kind of ‘democracy’ mirrors the kind of voting we saw during the Soviet Union. There are reports coming from Ukrainians that the referendum vote was conducted by occupying forces and that some people voted under gun point. The Luhansk Oblast Governor reported that Russian troops checked homes of residents and wrote down the names of locals who voted against annexation.

Putin said on February 24, the date of the Russian invasion, that the Ukrainian state is illegitimate and was conceived by “building their statehood on the negation of everything that united us, trying to distort the mentality and historical memory of millions of people, of entire generations living in Ukraine.” And Putin was coming to the defense of the good Russian people living in Ukraine - which is, in truth, just a colony of Russia.

Putin worked around the UN Charter that views seizure of foreign lands as a blatant form of violent aggression not seen since Hitler. Putin argues that his invasion is in support of the separatists - which is no more egregious than what the West did in Kosovo in 1998. In speaking of previously annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin said that NATO’s action in Kosovo was a precedent that “our western colleagues created with their own hands in a very similar situation, when they agreed that the unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia…was legitimate and did not require any permission from the country’s central authorities.”

Note: I will be the first to agree that historically the West has not always adhered to international law in its international relations. But the analysis and comparison of Russian invasion of Ukraine with NATO participation in the Kosovo-Serbia conflict is deeply flawed. In this war, Russia - an independent sovereign state has invaded and now is taking territory from another sovereign state. This kind of blatant international thievery happened in WWII with Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland and in 1990 when Iraq attempted to annex Kuwait.

Turkey has announced it rejects Russia's annexation of Ukrainian territory. South Korea stated it won't recognize Russia's annexation of Ukrainian territory. The European Council on Friday, Sep. 30 vowed that they would “never recognize” Russia’s illegal annexation of four more regions in Ukraine.

In the United States, the Senate and the House of Representatives is drafting legislation to cut off all military and economic aid to any country that recognizes the annexed territories as part of Russia. And President Biden said that the United States would “never, never, never” recognize Russia’s claims.

The General Secretary of the United Nation said, “I want to underscore that the so-called “referenda” in the occupied regions were conducted during active armed conflict, in areas under Russian occupation, and outside Ukraine’s legal and constitutional framework. They cannot be called a genuine expression of the popular will.”

Even some of Russia’s closest allies – China, India, Kazakhstan, and Serbia – have indicated that they will not recognize the results of the referendums or the annexation.

The annexations of the 4 regions are important to Putin for a number of reasons. The four territories create a land corridor between Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow ‘annexed’ in 2014. And Putin hopes that the new annexations will give legitimacy to his invasion to show both Russians and his global allies that he has accomplished what he promised. There also is fear that Putin is actually expanding Russian territory so that as the Ukrainian military moves back into occupied Ukrainian territory, then Putin will claim that Ukrainians are attacking Russia. Putin has said numerous times that if Russia is attacked that it will be within his right to use nuclear weapons to defend the homeland. The word ‘existential threat’ is repeated over and over.

Ironically, Russia does not actually militarily control all of the territory that it has claimed to annex. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, was forced to acknowledge on October 3rd that Russia’s borders — as the Russian government newly defines them — remained in flux.

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