The laws that Russian President Vladimir Putin signed on Wednesday to formalize annexation that formally absorbs four Ukrainian regions into Russia have been dismissed as “worthless” by Kyiv.
The head of the Ukraine President’s Office, Andriy Yermak, said on his Telegram channel that ‘collective insane asylum can continue to live in a fictional world’, referring to Russia, calling it a terrorist country whose worthless decisions that are not worth the paper they are signed on.
Previously on Tuesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky announced in his nightly address that he had signed a decree rendering void any of the acts that Putin has designed to annex Ukrainian territories since Crimea’s annexation in 2014.
Putin has signed the documents finalizing the annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions, which was carried out in defiance of international laws, even as Russian troops are struggling to control the territory that was illegally annexed.
Following Kremlin-orchestrated referendums in all four regions, both houses of the Russian parliament ratified treaties making them part of the Russian Federation, which has pushed Moscow’s war in Ukraine into a new, more dangerous phase.
Although the Kremlin has vowed to defend Russia’s territory – including the newly absorbed regions – with any means at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, the borders of the territories Russia is claiming still remain unclear.
When asked how the borders of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions should be defined under the Kremlin’s newly signed claimed illegal annexations, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov refrained from giving a concrete answer, saying only that “certain territories there are still to be returned,” following the Ukrainian forces’ rapid advances in the south.
With Ukrainian forces retaking more territory in the east and in the south, the very same regions Moscow has pushed to annex, Russia faces mounting setbacks, such as the so-called de-occupation of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region announced by Serhiy Hayday, head of the Luhansk region’s Ukrainian military administration, on Wednesday.
Noting that the process has begun, Hayday added that several settlements have already been liberated from the Russian army.