KYIV —
Kremlin-backed officials in Ukraine appealed to President
Vladimir Putin
Wednesday to annex the regions under their control, after the territories held
votes denounced by Kyiv and the West as a “sham”.
اضافة اعلان
Ukraine called
on the EU to hit Russia with more sanctions and
NATO to send more weapons to
the frontline after the Kremlin-installed officials rolled out the alleged
results late Tuesday.
The appeal came
despite repeated warnings from Moscow that it could use its nuclear arsenal to
defend the territories from a Ukrainian counter-offensive that has wrested back
swathes of territory this month already.
The EU slammed
the “illegal” vote and said results were “falsified”, while Chancellor Olaf
Scholz said Germany would “never recognize the results of the sham
referendums”.
Lugansk was the
first Russian-controlled region of Ukraine to appeal to Putin to intervene,
with recently captured southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson filling in
shortly after.
“Our residents
made a historic choice and have decided to become part of the multinational
population of the Russian Federation,” the Kremlin-installed leader in Kherson,
Vladimir Saldo, said in a statement published on social media.
Only Donetsk —
which along with Lugansk make up the industrial Donbas region and have been
partially controlled by pro-Kremlin separatists since 2014 — had yet to
formally ask Putin for annexation.
The appeal to
Putin represents a turning point in the seven-month invasion as Russian
officials in Moscow suggest they could use nuclear weapons in
Ukraine and Putin
calls up thousands of Russian military draftees to cement the Kremlin’s
authority in the territories.
Taken together,
the four territories — Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south; Donetsk and
Lugansk in the east — create a crucial land corridor between Russia and the
Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014.
Together, all
five make up around 20 percent of Ukraine, whose forces in recent weeks have
been clawing back ground.
Despite those
gains — particularly in the northeast — Russian forces have battered the
second-largest city of Kharkiv and overnight a salvo of missiles hit a railway
yard, knocking out power to more than 18,000 households.
Lawmakers are
expected to vote hastily to annex the territories now that the results have
been announced, and Russian news agencies have said Putin could sign
legislation formalizing the land grab this week.
The EU slammed the
“illegal” annexation votes and their “falsified” results, the bloc’s foreign
policy chief Josep Borrell said and Scholz repeated that Germany believes the
ballots carry no weight.
“Germany will
never recognize the results of the sham referendums” in the regions of Donetsk,
Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, Scholz told Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky, according to the chancellor’s spokesman Steffen Hebestreit.
‘I’m in shock’
Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine coincided with his decision
to call up hundreds of thousands of military reservists to back up
Russia’s
struggling forces in eastern Ukraine.
The move has
sparked panic, protests and an exodus among military-aged Russian men for
neighboring countries like Georgia and Kazakhstan.
Moscow announced
Wednesday it would no longer issue passports to Russian men called up to serve
and a region bordering Russia closed to passenger cars, with both moves fueling
fears in Russia that borders could close entirely.
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