BREAKING: Russia says it will annex four occupied regions of Ukraine following referendums that were dismissed by the West as 'sham' elections.
It comes after Moscow-backed authorities staged votes in the occupied regions of Ukraine's east and south that wereKremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russian President Vladimir Putin would attend a ceremony on the accession of the four regions — Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia — at the Kremlin's St. George's Hall on Friday.
The State Department says it will slap further economic sanctions on Russia in response to what spokesperson Ned Price called a “land grab” on Wednesday. “Based on our information, every aspect of this referenda process was pre-staged and orchestrated by the Kremlin,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told another briefing.
There is also international concern about how Moscow might seek to defend its new claimed territory if and when Kyiv tries to take it back. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has suggested it could be preparedThe hastily arranged votes were announced last week alongside Putin's declaration that he would betrying to flee the draft, with miles of lines of traffic at border crossings with Georgia and Finland — the latter closing its frontier Thursday.
Many Western experts see the moves as acts of desperation by Putin, whose armies have been pushed back by a lightning Ukrainian counteroffensive in recent weeks.
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