Russia has moved quickly to secure its hold on Ukraine’s rebel regions after President Vladimir Putin signed a decree recognising their independence.
The new Russian legislation allows the deployment of troops in a challenge to Western governments, which are preparing to announce sanctions against Moscow.
The bills, which are set to be quickly rubber-stamped by the Kremlin-controlled parliament, may set the stage for Russian troops to move deeper into Ukraine as the US and its allies have feared.
Soon after Mr Putin signed the decree, convoys of armoured vehicles were seen rolling across the separatist-controlled territories.
It was not immediately clear if they were Russian.
Mr Putin’s decision to recognise the rebel regions as independent states follows a near eight-year separatist conflict that has killed more than 14,000 people and devastated Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, Donbas.
The latest developments were condemned by many countries around the world.
Ever since the conflict erupted weeks after Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula, Ukraine and its Western allies have accused Moscow of backing the separatists with troops and weapons, the charges it has denied, saying that Russians who fought in the east were volunteers.
Mr Putin’s move on Monday formalises Russia’s hold on the regions and gives it a free hand to deploy its forces there.
Several senior legislators suggested that Russia could recognise the rebel-held territories in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine in their original administrative borders, including the chunks of land currently under Ukrainian control.
.@POTUS has signed an Executive Order imposing costs for President Putin’s action to recognize so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.
Read more: https://t.co/D7gZrOVzgK— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 21, 2022
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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky sought to project calm, telling the country in an address overnight: “We are not afraid of anyone or anything. We don’t owe anyone anything. And we won’t give anything to anyone.”
His foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, is in Washington on Tuesday to meet US secretary of state Antony Blinken.
The White House responded to Mr Putin’s move quickly, issuing an executive order to prohibit US investment and trade in the separatist regions, and additional measures – likely sanctions – will be announced on Tuesday.
Those sanctions are independent of what Washington has prepared in the event of a Russian invasion, officials said.
The UK and European Union countries have separately indicated that they also are planning to announce sanctions.
While Ukraine and the West said the Russian recognition of the rebel regions shatters a 2015 peace deal, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, challenged that, noting that Moscow is not a party to the Minsk agreement and arguing that it could still be implemented if Ukraine chooses to do so.
The 2015 deal brokered by France and Germany and signed in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, required Ukraine to offer a sweeping self-rule to the rebel regions in a diplomatic coup for Russia after a series of Ukrainian military defeats.
Many in Ukraine resented the deal as a betrayal of national interests and a blow to the country’s integrity, and its implementation has stalled.
Mr Putin announced the move in an hour-long televised speech, blaming the US and its allies for the current crisis and describing Ukraine’s bid to join Nato as an existential challenge to Russia.
“Ukraine’s membership in Nato poses a direct threat to Russia’s security,” he said.
Russia says it wants Western guarantees that Nato will not allow Ukraine and other former Soviet countries to join as members. However, Mr Putin said on Monday that a simple moratorium on Ukraine’s accession would not be enough.
Moscow has also demanded that the alliance should halt weapons deployments to Ukraine and roll back its forces from Eastern Europe – demands flatly rejected by the West.
Mr Putin warned that the Western rejection of Moscow’s demands gives Russia the right to take other steps to protect its security.
Sweeping through more than a century of history, Mr Putin painted today’s Ukraine as a modern construct used by the West to contain Russia despite the neighbours inextricable links.
In a stark warning to Ukraine, the Russian leader charged that it has unfairly inherited Russia’s historic land granted to it by the Communist rulers of the Soviet Union and mocked its effort to shed the Communist past in a so-called “decommunisation” campaign.
“We are ready to show you what the real decommunisation would mean for Ukraine,” Mr Putin added ominously, in an apparent signal of his readiness to raise new land claims.
With an estimated 150,000 Russian troops massed on three sides of Ukraine, the US has warned that Moscow has already decided to invade.
FM #Lavrov: Western colleagues are not prepared to take up our major proposals, primarily on #NATO’s eastward non-expansion. This demand was rejected with reference to the bloc’s so-called open-door policy.
🔗 https://t.co/CdelvNgk5A pic.twitter.com/5GTVTRE58r— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) February 22, 2022
President Joe Biden and Mr Putin tentatively agreed to a meeting brokered by French leader Emmanuel Macron in a last-ditch effort to avoid war.
Mr Macron’s office said Mr Biden and Mr Putin had “accepted the principle of such a summit”, to be followed by a broader meeting that would include other “relevant stakeholders to discuss security and strategic stability in Europe”.
If Russia moves in, the meeting will be off, but the prospect of a face-to-face summit resuscitated hopes that diplomacy can prevent a conflict that would devastate Ukraine and cause huge economic damage across Europe, which is heavily dependent on Russian energy.
Tensions have continued to fly high in eastern Ukraine, with more shelling reported along the tense line of contact between the rebels and Ukrainian forces.
Ukraine’s military said two Ukrainian soldiers were killed and another 12 were wounded by shelling over the last 24 hours.
It has rejected the rebel claims of shelling residential areas and insisted that Ukrainian forces were not returning fire.
