President Vladimir V. Putin claimed on Friday that Russia would take control of four Ukrainian regions and denounced the United States for its “satanism” in a speech that marked an escalation in Moscow’s war against Ukraine and a positioned Russia, in terms of direct confrontation, as fighting an existential battle with Western elites whom he considered “the enemy”.
Addressing hundreds of Russian lawmakers and governors in a large Kremlin hall, Mr Putin said people in the four regions – which are still partially controlled by Ukrainian forces – would become Russian citizens “forever”. He then held a signing ceremony with the Russian-installed leaders in those areas to start the formal annexation process, before shaking their hands and chanting “Russia! Russia!”
Mr Putin’s address came amid Russian embarrassment on the battlefield, where Ukrainian forces have won stunning victories in recent weeks in the east. Even as the Russian leader spoke, Ukrainian officials said their army surrounded the Russian-occupied town of Lyman, a strategically important center in the Donetsk region that lies inside territory claimed by Mr Putin .
Even by Mr. Putin’s increasingly adversarial standards, the speech was extraordinary, a combination of bluster and menace that mixed riffs against Western attitudes on gender identity with a call for the world to see Russia as the leader of an uprising against American power. He called “the ruling circles of the so-called West” the “enemy”, a word he rarely uses.
“Not only are Western elites denying national sovereignty and international law,” he said in his 37-minute speech. “Their hegemony has a pronounced character of totalitarianism, despotism and apartheid.”
Western leaders have condemned Russia’s annexations as illegal and the “referendums” that preceded them – purporting to show local support for Russian membership – as fraudulent. The Biden administration has threatened further sanctions if the Kremlin goes ahead with its demands.
The Ukrainian government has pushed back against Mr Putin’s claims and has pledged to take back Russian-captured territory to the east and south. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky responded to Putin’s speech on Friday by announcing that he was accelerating his country’s NATO bid. In a video, he accuses the Kremlin of wanting to “steal something that doesn’t belong to them” and of wanting to “rewrite history and redraw borders with murder, torture, blackmail and lies”.
“Ukraine will not allow this,” he said.
Mr Putin insisted that Russia’s position on annexing the four territories was non-negotiable, adding that the country would defend them “with all the forces and means at our disposal”.
“I call on the Kyiv regime to immediately cease fire and all military action,” he said, and the Ukrainian government “to return to the negotiating table.”
“But we will not discuss the decision of the residents of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson,” he continued, referring to the four annexed Ukrainian regions. ” It is done. Russia will not betray him.
Mr Putin expressed the conflict with the West in even harsher terms than in his previous speeches, pointing to centuries of Western military actions to denounce the US-led world order as fundamentally wrong, corrupt and determined to destroy Russia.
“The crackdown on freedom takes on the contours of ‘reverse religion,’ real Satanism,” Putin said, saying liberal Western values on issues like gender identity amounted to “denial of man”.
But Mr Putin gave few new details on the issue that is perhaps now of most concern in Western capitals – if, and when, he might be ready to use weapons of mass destruction to force Ukraine to capitulate. His spokesman said earlier today that after the four regions were annexed – a move hardly any other country should recognize – an attack on those regions would be treated as an attack on Russia.
Without saying so directly, Mr. Putin hinted that the role of nuclear weapons in the war is on his mind. Describing the West as “deceitful and hypocritical through and through”, Mr Putin noted that the United States was the only country to have used nuclear weapons in wartime. He then added: “By the way, they set a precedent.”
Mr. Putin’s speech appealed to three key audiences. For the Russians, he sought to justify the growing hardship his war had caused by insisting that they were fighting for survival. To the West, he strove to telegraph his determination that he was unsubdued by sanctions or arms shipments to Ukraine, and that he would continue to fight – with the veiled threat of the huge Russia’s nuclear arsenal in the background.
And to the rest of the world, Mr Putin sought to present himself as the leader of a global movement against the “Western racists” who he said were imposing American hegemony on the world. The West, he argued, had not changed from centuries past when it had brutally colonized poor countries and fought wars for economic advantage.
Western countries, he insisted, had “no moral right” to condemn the annexation of parts of Ukraine.
“Western elites remain colonizers as they always have been,” Putin said. “They divided the world between their vassals – the so-called ‘civilized countries’ – and everyone else.”
As Mr Putin spoke, a crowd gathered in Red Square outside the Kremlin for a concert and rally celebrating the annexation. Russian media reported that universities in Moscow had asked students to attend. After Mr. Putin’s speech, pro-Kremlin pop music figures sang nationalist songs on a stage that read “Russia!” and was flanked by banners reading “People’s Choice!” and “Together forever!”
Valerie Hopkins and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.