KHARKIV, Ukraine — In an almost-hourlong address that alternated between furious anti-Western rhetoric and the excoriation of Ukraine as a puppet nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday recognized two Ukrainian breakaway republics as independent, a move certain to further incite animosities with the West and escalate fears of an invasion that could ignite fighting reminiscent of World War II and redraw the map of Eastern Europe.
Putin’s speech to the Russian people drew swift rebuke and condemnation from Washington and across European capitals. President Joe Biden and the European Union announced economic sanctions aimed at cutting trade and business with the breakaway enclaves. By day’s end, with Moscow ordering troops into the republics, it appeared diplomacy was failing and the region was veering inexorably toward war.
Sitting back in his chair behind a wooden desk equipped with a bank of telephones and a computer, Putin began a speech that detailed Ukraine’s origins and its territorial evolution across history. He said, in essence, Ukraine was a Bolshevik-constructed amalgam created entirely by Russia.
“Ukraine was never a true nation,” he said.
In his telling, Ukraine had now become a Western puppet, a corruption-riddled government that has delivered only “bankruptcy in a country that produced rockets and space technology” back when the country was one of the Soviet Union’s republics. The blame, he said, lay with Western organizations and governments that had effectively plundered the country’s resources and left the state with no power.
“There’s just no independent Ukrainian state,” he said.
Putin also touched on Ukraine’s geopolitical importance and was adamant that if Ukraine was ever granted NATO membership it would be a “direct threat” to Russia. He recited with growing fury — as if a speech out of the Cold War — the list of countries that had joined NATO and were now close enough to Russia’s border to present a danger. He dismissed assurances that Ukraine’s membership was a far-away prospect, if it happened at all.
“OK, not tomorrow, but what about after tomorrow?” he said.
“What does that change for the historical prospects? Nothing.”
For those reasons, he said, “I consider it necessary to make a long overdue decision: to immediately recognize the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic,” Putin said, using the official name of the two Russian-created enclaves. He asked Russia’s Federal Assembly to support the decision, and ratify the treaties “of friendship” and — critically — “mutual assistance” with both republics.
“And from those who seized and hold power in Kyiv, we demand an immediate cessation of hostilities,” he said. “Otherwise, all responsibility for the possible continuation of the bloodshed will be fully and wholly on the conscience of the regime ruling on the territory of Ukraine.”
Putin watched as separatist leaders Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik signed the decree. Putin then — with a slight smirk — scribbled his signature on the papers.
Waves of reproach and outrage came quickly, especially among European leaders for whom Putin’s words invoked the ghosts of some of the continent’s most bloody episodes, from World War II to the Balkans wars of barely a single generation ago.
And U.S. officials, who have for weeks been predicting such actions of conquest from Putin, announced they were imposing new sanctions designed to inflict pain on anyone attempting to do business with the enclaves — although it was unclear how many American business people are investing in the region. The sanctions are more limited than measures the U.S. and Europe have been threatening if Putin invaded Ukraine.
While Biden administration officials huddled in consultations, the president spent more than a half-hour on the telephone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the White House said, reassuring him of U.S. support. Zelenskyy confirmed the call and said he and Biden discussed “the events of the last hours” and that he’d also taken a call from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
“Putin’s address tonight, together with the military forces around Ukraine, represents the most outrageous rejection of the rules based order for European peace we’ve seen since WWII,” Henry Bolton, a British international security expert and former politician, said on Twitter. “He’s threatened Ukraine’s right to exist and may well fabricate the excuse for a full invasion.”
In Washington, where the cause of Ukrainian sovereignty has attracted rare bipartisan support, a group of lawmakers who attended last week’s critical Munich security conference vowed unity and resolve in opposing “Russian aggression.”
“No matter what happens in the coming days, we must assure that the dictator Putin and his corrupt oligarchs pay a devastating price for their decisions,” the group said in a statement.
The independence declaration could have massive consequences: The separatists claim all of the Donbas region as territory for their republics. But they control only part of it. If they intend to take the full territory with Russian help, it would lead to full-on clashes between Ukrainian and Russian troops, setting the stage for an escalation sure to embroil Western nations.
Putin’s announcement came after a meeting with his security council, which urged him to demand independence for the republics. The meeting followed Russia’s assertion that Ukrainian army units had breached its border Monday, another in a series of claims the West fears will provide Russia with a supposed justification for an invasion of its neighbor.
Putin’s new strategy would mean the end of the Minsk agreements, the much-reviled accords — signed after Russia-backed separatist forces surrounded several thousand Ukrainian soldiers — that have maintained a threadbare cease-fire in the Donbas since 2015. But more immediately, it could also provide the cover for Moscow to begin its blitz into Ukraine.
Russia’s forces seem poised to strike for just such a moment. Some 150,000 troops and a large-scale arsenal of Russia’s top land, air and sea materiel is now assembled on Ukraine’s borders. Moscow has repeatedly denied it has plans for an invasion but has warned that Western failure to engage with its security demands, including a pledge never to allow Ukraine to join NATO, would trigger a “military-technical response.” The Kremlin has not elaborated on what that would mean.
Frenzied shuttle diplomacy — chiefly from French President Emmanuel Macron, engaging in as diplomatic broker with Biden and Putin — has failed to stop what appears to be an inevitable path to war.
The Russian leader has previously accused the Ukrainian government of pursuing “genocide” in Donetsk and Luhansk, the vast majority of whose populations are ethnic Russians. The U.S. and NATO have accused Moscow of planning so-called false-flag operations in the area to justify an all-out invasion of Ukraine.
On Monday, Russia’s military said it killed five saboteurs crossing into its territory from Ukraine and destroyed two Ukrainian army combat vehicles. But the Ukrainian military dismissed those claims, which were reported by Russian state news agencies, as “completely fake.”
Since 2014, fighting between Kyiv’s forces and the Russia-backed secessionists in Donetsk and Luhansk, which make up Ukraine’s Donbas region, has killed more than 14,000 people. A cease-fire has been breached repeatedly by both sides. In recent weeks, as Russian troops massed near Ukraine’s borders, Russian-aligned media and digital actors have churned out constant stories of Ukrainian atrocities against ethnic Russians as part of a disinformation campaign to paint the government in Kyiv as a cabal of violent far-right nationalists.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on NBC’s “Today” show Monday that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be “extremely violent” and appeared to be days, if not hours, away. The Biden administration has insisted for several days that a Russian assault was imminent.
“This will not simply be some conventional war between two armies. It will be a war waged by Russia on the Ukrainian people to repress them, to crush them, to harm them,” Sullivan said. “We believe the world must mobilize to counter this kind of Russian aggression should those tanks roll across the border.”
Sullivan said Biden remained open to a summit with Putin — which Macron has tried to broker — but downplayed the likelihood that one would occur. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is scheduled to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday — as long as there has been no invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. says.
“Every indication we see on the ground right now in, terms of the disposition of Russian forces, is that they are in fact getting prepared for a major attack on Ukraine,” Sullivan said. “We will go the extra mile on diplomacy, but we are also prepared with our allies and partners to respond decisively if Russia attacks.”
The Russian army’s Southern Military District — which operates in areas neighboring Ukraine — said Monday that troops and border guards had prevented an incursion of what it called a “sabotage and reconnaissance group” coming in from Ukraine into Russian territory.
“Five violators of the Russian Federation’s border from a sabotage and reconnaissance group were eliminated in an armed clash,” said a statement from the army, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. The statement said the incursion occurred around 6 a.m. near Mityakinskaya, a Russian border village about 22 miles east of the city of Luhansk.
During the clash, a pair of Ukrainian army vehicles entered Russian territory but were destroyed by Russian military units using anti-tank systems, the statement said, adding: “No Russian Armed Forces and Federal Security Service members have been hurt.”
A spokesman for the Ukrainian military’s Joint Forces Operation rejected the Russian allegations, saying that “all information about a possible incursion by a reconnaissance group is false. We haven’t done any assault operations. It’s completely fake.”
In Moscow, the deputy chairman of the security council, Dmitry Medvedev, told Putin that if Russia went ahead and recognized Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics, it would face “unprecedented pressure” internationally but that there was no choice. He said Russia’s previous recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia had been a lesson to the West that Russia could not be ignored, according to a translation of Medvedev’s comments by the Al-Jazeera news channel.
Putin said the use of Ukraine “as an instrument of confrontation with our country poses a serious, very big threat to us.” Moscow’s priority, he said, was “not confrontation, but security.”
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(Times staff writers Erin B. Logan, Jennifer Haberkorn, Eli Stokols and Tracy Wilkinson in Washington and Henry Chu in London contributed to this report.)
