Putin to host ceremony annexing occupied Ukrainian territories on Friday, Kremlin says

 

Russia will on Friday begin formally annexing up to 18% of Ukrainian territory, with President Vladimir Putin expected to host a ceremony in the Kremlin to declare four occupied Ukrainian territories part of Russia.

The ceremony would take place on Friday at 15:00 local time (08:00 ET) in the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. Putin will deliver a speech and meet with Russian-backed leaders of the four occupied regions on the sidelines of the ceremony, he added.

Next week, Russia’s two houses of parliament – the State Duma and Federation Council – will consider the annexation.

Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, will meet on October 3 and 4, its chairman, Vyacheslav Volodin, said, according to RIA Novosti. The state news agency cited Volodin as saying that the State Duma’s schedule had been adjusted so the deputies could make legislative decisions based on the supposed results of the polls.

The Federation Council, Russia’s upper house, will consider the annexation of the occupied Ukrainian territories on October 4, Andrey Klishas, Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation, said in a Telegram post on Thursday.

The announcements come after people in four occupied areas of Ukraine supposedly voted in huge numbers in favor of joining Russia, in five-day polls that were illegal under international law and dismissed by Kyiv and the West as a sham.

The so-called referendums were organized by Russian-backed separatists in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) in the eastern Donbas region, where fighting has raged since the rebels seized control of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014.

The other two areas to hold so-called referendums were Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine. Russia has occupied the two regions since shortly after it invaded the country in late February.

Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Russian-backed administration in Kherson, urged Putin to annex the region on Wednesday, following the so-called referendum there.

The Moscow-aligned leadership in all four places claimed the processes yielded massive majorities for those “voting” in favor of acceding to Russian sovereignty: 87.05% in Kherson, 93.11% in Zaporizhzhia, 98.42% in the LPR and 99.23% in the DPR.

The process was widely panned as illegitimate, as experts said it was impossible to hold a free and fair election in a war zone or occupied territory. A top United Nations official, Rosemary DiCarlo, said the votes “cannot be called a genuine expression of the popular will.”

“Unilateral actions aimed to provide a veneer of legitimacy to the attempted acquisition by force by one state of another state’s territory, while claiming to represent the will of the people, cannot be regarded as legal under international law,” said DiCarlo, the UN’s under-secretary-general.

Meanwhile, the European Union on Wednesday proposed additional sanctions in retaliation for Moscow’s annexation plan, targeting “those involved in Russia occupation and illegal annexation of areas of Ukraine,” including “the proxy Russian authorities in Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and other Russian individuals who organized and facilitated the sham referenda in these four occupied territories of Ukraine.”

Reports from the ground suggest that voting in the occupied regions was done essentially – and in some cases, literally – at gunpoint. Serhii Hayday, the Ukrainian head of the Luhansk region military administration, said that authorities were going door to door, trailed by armed guards, to collect votes, and that local populations were being intimidated into voting to join Russia.

The results also contradict data from before the war. An exclusive CNN poll of Ukrainians conducted in February, just before Russia’s invasion, found just 18% of Ukrainians in the east – including the Luhansk and Donetsk regions – agreed with the statement that “Russia and Ukraine should be one country,” while 16% of Ukrainians in the south, which included the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, supported it.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday the process was a “farce” that “cannot even be called an imitation of referendums.”

Zelensky also accused Russia of attempting to use the same strategy as it did when Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014. A referendum organized there, which officially saw 97% of voters back annexation, was ratified by Russian lawmakers within a week. Much of the international community did not respect that outcome, and it appears they will do the same with Tuesday’s results.

Some of the separatist leaders involved in carrying out sham referendums to secede from Ukraine and join Russia landed in Moscow Thursday, according to a photograph posted by the Russia-appointed deputy head of the Kherson regional military administration Kirill Stremousov.

LPR chief Leonid Pasechnik told Russian state news agency TASS Thursday he was also in the Russian capital.

Reuters said Thursday that a stage with giant video screens has been set up on Red Square, alongside billboards proclaiming “Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson - Russia!.” TASS had previously reported that a rally would be held in front of the Kremlin on Friday in support of the poll results of the so-called referendums.

Feared military escalation

Alhough the results of the Russian-backed referendums are unsurprising, there is concern Russia’s attempts to assert sovereignty over Ukrainian territory could portend a dangerous escalation in the seven-month-long war.

The Kremlin is expected to treat the territories as though they are parts of Russia, warning that it would defend them as such – signaling a potential military escalation once the Ukrainian Army attempts to reclaim them.

In an address on September 21, Putin raised the specter of nuclear weapons, saying he would use “all the means at our disposal” if he deemed the “territorial integrity” of Russia to be jeopardized.

The so-called referendums came after a sudden and successful Ukrainian offensive through most of the occupied Kharkiv region swung momentum in the conflict back towards Kyiv this month, galvanizing Ukraine’s Western backers and causing anger in Russia, which has time and again been stymied on the battlefield.

With losses piling up, Putin has enacted a “partial mobilization” of Russian citizens, meaning those who are in the reserve could be called up and nationals with military experience would be subject to conscription – and potentially sent to defend the illegally annexed territories. At the outset of the conflict, Putin was careful to emphasize that the military assault, euphemistically referred to as a “special military operation,” would only be fought by military professionals.

More than 200,000 people have traveled from Russia into Georgia, Kazakhstan and the EU since the announcement. Upwards of 50,000 Russians have fled to Finland and at least 100,000 have crossed into Kazakhstan. Images from crossings into Finland, Georgia and Mongolia show massive traffic jams on the Russian side of each border.

Protests against the partial mobilization have broken out in some of Russia’s ethnic minority regions. Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky, have alleged that Russia is forcibly drafting domestic protesters; entire segments of male populations in remote villages; and fighting-age men from minority communities as well as occupied territories in Ukraine. A Ukrainian mayor-in-exile alleged Russia was conscripting his constituents to “use them as cannon fodder.”

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Gorbachev's moral authority did little to stop Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) talks to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (L) in December 2004.

 

It's hard to sift history's judgment from the hot takes, and Russian President Vladimir Putin's telegram of condolence on the death of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev does little to help.

"He led our country during a period of complex, dramatic changes, large-scale foreign policy, and economic and social challenges," the statement read. "He deeply understood that reforms were necessary, he strove to offer his own solutions to urgent problems."

A sense of protocol may have kept the Kremlin leader from telling us what he really thinks about the man who presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union, something Putin once called the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the twentieth century. For a more unvarnished opinion, we can rely on Margarita Simonyan, the bellicose editor-in-chief of state propaganda outlet RT (formerly Russia Today).

"Gorbachev is dead," Simonyan wrote on Twitter. "Time to gather up what's been scattered."

Simonyan seems to be channeling her President, who has embarked on a campaign of imperial restoration with the invasion of Ukraine. And it's tempting to look at the two leaders through a simple narrative arc: Gorbachev allowed the 15 republics of the Soviet Union to spin apart, and Putin is trying, through brute force, to piece that empire back together.

On February 26, two days after Russia's invasion, Gorbachev's foundation called for an "early cessation of hostilities and immediate start of peace negotiations."

But it would be a stretch to say that Gorbachev has been a consistent and vocal critic of Putin. For starters, Gorbachev came out as a supporter of Russia's 2014 move to annex the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine, a prelude to Putin's full-scale invasion of the country.

And looking further back, Gorbachev himself resisted the breakup of the Soviet Union. In a wide-ranging 2012 interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, the last Soviet President insisted that his efforts to hold the USSR together were undermined by a scheming Boris Yeltsin -- who went on to become the President of an independent Russia after the 1991 collapse -- and by the Soviet leadership.

"You will not find in any of my speeches until the very end anything that supported the breakup of the union," Gorbachev said. "The breakup of the union was the result of betrayal by the Soviet nomenklatura (party elite), by the bureaucracy, and also Yeltsin's betrayal."

Gorbachev's main complaint was that Yeltsin supported a so-called union treaty that would have preserved the USSR as a more loose federation, but worked in parallel behind his back to establish his own power base and orchestrate Russia's exit from the union.

In reality, national independence movements in Ukraine, the Baltics and other republics had already gathered substantial momentum by the late perestroika (restructuring) era. And after the failed August 1991 putsch by hardliners, Gorbachev's union treaty was effectively dead in the water.

In fairness, Gorbachev was not the only one to misread the situation. Just weeks before the August 1991 coup attempt, US President George H.W. Bush paid a visit to Kyiv -- then the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic -- and gave a speech admonishing Ukrainians to avoid what he called "suicidal nationalism."

Bush's speech -- remembered today as the "Chicken Kyiv" speech -- went over like a lead balloon. Bush and his advisers may have been worried about the nightmare scenario of an implosive breakup as was then beginning in Yugoslavia, leaving a massive nuclear arsenal in uncertain hands. But within a few months, Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for independence.

Gorbachev, who began his rise through the ranks of the Communist Party in Russia's southern Stavropol region, simply may have not comprehended the national aspirations of Ukrainians -- or the desires of other nations imprisoned within the USSR for independence. His willingness to violently put down protests in Soviet republics -- something more rarely mentioned in discussions of his career -- is a blot on his legacy. That does not necessarily put Gorbachev in the same league as Putin, who refuses to accept Ukraine as a legitimate nation, and laments what he calls the "artificial division of Russians and Ukrainians."

It is often noted that Gorbachev -- who signed key arms control agreements that lowered the temperature of the Cold War and steered the world away from the perils of nuclear war -- enjoys international stature while often being reviled in Russia. Admirers of Gorbachev like to point out that he had a deeply humanistic streak.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta -- a newspaper Gorbachev helped fund -- praised the late leader for his gentle nature, a quality rarely noted in Putin.

"He loved a woman [his wife Raisa] more than his job," he wrote in a tribute. "I think he just couldn't hug her if his hands were covered in blood."

Could Gorbachev have used what remained of his moral authority in Russia to call out Putin more strongly for his actions? And would an indifferent Russian public have listened? That we will never know. But his reticence meant that his criticisms of Russia's slide toward dictatorship were often muted.

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US sanctions Putin's reputed girlfriend

The US Treasury Department on Tuesday sanctioned Russian President Vladimir Putin's reputed girlfriend as part of a series of measures targeting Russian elites in the Biden administration's latest attempt to punish the Kremlin for its ongoing war in Ukraine.

Alina Maratovna Kabaeva, who has been romantically linked to the Russian leader, was sanctioned "for being or having been a leader, official, senior executive officer, or member of the board of directors of the Government of the Russian Federation," a Treasury Department statement said.

That statement describes the 39-year-old Kabaeva as having "a close relationship to Putin." She is a former member of the State Duma "and is the current head of the National Media Group, a pro-Kremlin empire of television, radio, and print organizations."

In April, the Wall Street Journal reported that sanctioning Kabaeva was under consideration by the US, but there was concern that such a move would inflame tensions given her close proximity to Putin.

Kabaeva was previously sanctioned by the European Union and the United Kingdom.

In addition to Kabaeva, the Treasury Department announced sanctions against a number of other oligarchs, a major steel production company and two of its subsidiaries as well as a financial institution accused of running a sanctions evasion operation and its general director.

Sources: Putin's reputed girlfriend set to be sanctioned by EU

 

Separately, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced sanctions on three oligarchs, a Russian state-owned company overseen by the Ministry of Transportation, "four individuals and one entity illegitimately operating in Ukraine's territory in collaboration with Russia," and 24 Russian defense and technology-related entities.

The US is also imposing visa restrictions on 893 Russian Federation officials and "31 foreign government officials who have acted to support Russia's purported annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine and thereby threatened or violated Ukraine's sovereignty," Blinken said.

Many of the designations announced by the US target oligarchs who were previously sanctioned by allies like the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the European Union. They come as the war in Ukraine has entered its sixth month.

'Opulent lifestyles'

"As innocent people suffer from Russia's illegal war of aggression, Putin's allies have enriched themselves and funded opulent lifestyles," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement. "The Treasury Department will use every tool at our disposal to make sure that Russian elites and the Kremlin's enablers are held accountable for their complicity in a war that has cost countless lives."

The oligarchs sanctioned by the State Department Tuesday are Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko, Alexander Anatolevich Ponomarenko, and Dmitry Aleksandrovich Pumpyanskiy. The yacht AXIOMA was identified as blocked property in which Pumpyanskiy has an interest, the State Department said in a fact sheet.

According to that fact sheet, Ponomarenko "is an oligarch with close ties to other oligarchs and the construction of Vladimir Putin's seaside palace" who has previously been sanctioned by the UK, EU, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Among the oligarchs sanctioned by the Treasury Department Tuesday is Andrey Grigoryevich Guryev, the Russian billionaire founder of the chemical company "PhosAgro" and former government official described by the Treasury as "a known close associate" of Putin. He is also sanctioned by the UK, and according to the US Treasury, he "owns the Witanhurst estate, which is the second largest estate in London after Buckingham Palace."

The Treasury Department on Tuesday identified the yacht Alfa Nero, reportedly owned by AG Guryev, as blocked property.

AG Guryev's son, Andrey Andreevich Guryev, was also sanctioned by the US Tuesday, after previously being sanctioned by Australia, Canada, the European Union, Switzerland, and the UK, as was his investment firm Dzhi AI Invest OOO.

Natalya Valeryevna Popova was sanctioned "for operating or having operated in the technology sector of the Russian Federation economy, and for being or having been a leader, official, senior executive officer, or member of the board of directors of LLC VEB Ventures," which is a sanctioned entity. She was also sanctioned for being the wife of Kirill Aleksandrovich Dmitriev, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF). Both he and the RDIF were sanctioned in the days following the start of the war.

The Joint Stock Company Promising Industrial and Infrastructure Technologies, "a financial institution owned by the Russian Federal Agency for State Property Management," and its General Director Anton Sergeevich Urusov were sanctioned Tuesday in relation to alleged sanctions evasion.

According to the Treasury Department, "JSC PPIT attempted to facilitate the circumvention of sanctions imposed on the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF)."

The Treasury Department sanctioned Publichnoe Aktsionernoe Obschestvo Magnitogorskiy Metallurgicheskiy Kombinat (MMK), described as "one of the world's largest steel producers," the chairman of its board of directors Viktor Filippovich Rashnikov -- who has also been sanctioned by Australia, Canada, the EU, Switzerland, and the UK -- and two of MMK's subsidiaries.

"MMK is one of Russia's largest taxpayers, providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation," the Treasury Department said. The agency has authorized a wind-down period for transactions with MMK and one of its subsidiaries.

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