Last day of referendum in Ukraine as Russia plans to annex the occupied regions

Neither the West nor Ukraine can stop Putin from claiming the regions, though the United States and its allies say they want Ukraine to defeat Russia on the battlefield – and will help it do so by supplying weapons, but not NATO troops.

NewsBharati    27-Sep-2022 14:56:04 PM
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Moscow, Sept 27: President Vladimir Putin is preparing to formally annex around 15% of Ukrainian territory after referendums on joining Russia in areas controlled by Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists.
 

Ukraine Referendum 
 
Neither the West nor Ukraine can stop Putin from claiming the regions, though the United States and its allies say they want Ukraine to defeat Russia on the battlefield – and will help it do so by supplying weapons, but not NATO troops.
 
 
 
The United States is prepared to impose additional economic costs on Russia in conjunction with U.S. allies if Moscow moves forward with annexing portions of Ukrainian territory, the White House said. After imposing severe sanctions on Russia, though, there is not a great deal of economic punishment left to inflict unless the United States could get China and India to agree to some sort of cap on the price of Russian energy.  The West could send more advanced weapons to Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country had received sophisticated air defense systems, known as National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS), from the United States. Zelensky has repeatedly warned that “pseudo-referendums” on annexation by Russia would destroy any chance of peace talks. One of the senior figures in his administration, Mykhailo Podolyak, called on Tuesday for any referendums to be met by an increase in international economic sanctions on Russia and increased arms supplies to Ukraine, including Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, a guided missile with a range of 300 km. Russia plans to annex around 15% of Ukraine that its forces control as well as about 3% of Ukraine that it does not control – including front lines where Ukrainian soldiers are still fighting, for example in the Donetsk region. 
 
 
The areas include:
A big chunk of eastern Ukraine, known as Donbas, is where high concentrations of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians live.
The two parts of the Donbas now include the self-styled Donetsk (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republics (LPR), which Putin recognized as independent states just before the Feb. 24 invasion. A frontline runs through Donetsk.
Referendums were held in 2014 in the two areas on secession from Ukraine.
Russian-controlled Kherson region.
Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia.
Taken together, Russia would be annexing at least 90,000 square km of Ukrainian territory. That is an area around the same size as Hungary or Portugal.
 
 
Russia, which recognized Ukraine’s post-Soviet borders in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, annexed Crimea in 2014. With Crimea and the territory in the four other areas, Russia would have annexed at least one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.