'We will not — indeed, we will never — recognize the annexation of Ukrainian territory by Russia,' U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Antonov said that"the sponsors of neo-Nazi criminals are approaching the dangerous line that Russia has repeatedly and clearly warned about."And he said it was Kyiv and its foreign backers who were proving a hindrance to ending the conflict through diplomatic means, which he said"cannot be effective as long as the collective West uses the Zelensky regime as a military mercenary against Russia.
Prior to the referendums, Russia, Syria and North Korea were the only U.N. member states to recognize the independence of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics. South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Russia-aligned breakaway states on territory internationally recognized as part of Georgia, also backed the two fellow separatist states' claim to sovereignty.
A prior referendum in 2014, when unrest first erupted in Ukraine, saw the southern Crimean Peninsula annexed by Russia in a move also met with Western criticism and a lack of recognition. As was the case eight years ago, the Kremlin is expected to announce formal measures to annex Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia into the Russian Federation, even as Ukrainian forces stage counteroffensives in an attempt to reclaim them. The move would incorporate key parts of Ukraine's eastern industrial Donbas region and southwestern Black Sea coastline, connecting Russia to Crimea by land.
It would also make the four regions subject to Russia's nuclear doctrine, which, in addition to responding to a ballistic missile or nuclear attack against the nation, allows the Kremlin to use nuclear weapons in the event of an"attack by [an] adversary against critical governmental or military sites of the Russian Federation, disruption of which would undermine nuclear forces response actions" and"aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons...
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