Putin to formally annex Russian-occupied Ukraine in hawkish speech lashing out at West

Vladimir Putin is set to formally annex Russian-occupied parts of eastern and southern Ukraine on Friday in a major speech that will herald a grim new phase of the war.

The illegal seizure of parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions follows referendums held there by pro-Russian puppet governments that have widely been decried as "shams".

It comes as an independent opinion poll released on Thursday showed another drop in Russian support for the war, down to 72 per cent in September from 76 per cent in August. It was 81 per cent in March.

The Levada Centre, Russia’s only independent pollster, also found that 70 per cent of people felt anxious, scared and shocked following Mr Putin's partial mobilisation announcement, and that 48 per cent of people want to launch peace talks with Ukraine.

But Mr Putin appears to have no such plans. On Thursday, he gave a preview of what is expected to be a hawkish speech on Friday celebrating the annexation and lashing out at the West.

“Our political opponents are ready to target anyone, turn any country into the epicentre of a crisis, provoke a revolution and unleash a bloodbath. We have seen it many times before,” he said in a conference call with the heads of intelligence agencies of former Soviet stations.

“We also know that the West is working on a blueprint to stoke new conflict in former Soviet states. All you have to do is to see what’s happening between Russia and Ukraine, on the border of other former Soviet states. Obviously all of this is the result of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Mr Putin also berated Russian officials for calling up people who were not supposed to be drafted into the army, in a rare admission of how much upset his partial mobilisation order has caused.

“We must correct mistakes and not allow them going forward,” he said, adding that everyone who doesn’t meet the criteria “must be sent home”.

Moscow authorities announced road closures in the city centre on Thursday for what is expected to be a major rally in support of the annexation, and rights activists reported university students and civil servants being forced to attend it.

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for President Putin, told reporters that the Russian leader will sign “treaties on the accession of territories into the Russian Federation” at the Kremlin at 3pm local time.

Sergei Kiriyenko, Mr Putin’s chief of staff, said on on Thursday that Russia will earmark about 3.3 billion rubles (£162 million) in aid for the annexed regions.

To formally annex those territories the Russian parliament and Russia’s Constitutional Court, which over recent years turned into rubber-stamp bodies, have to ratify and approve the treaties, something that is expected next week.

The developments mirror Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 when President Putin gathered several Crimean politicians to formalise the land-grab of the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula.

Mr Putin used a speech on the annexation day back then to assure the international community that Crimea was willingly joining Russia and that Moscow had no other territorial claims in Ukraine.

But within Russia's elite, there is very little genuine enthusiasm for the move, according to a piece in The Moscow Times on Thursday.

Kremlin insiders who spoke to the paper said Mr Putin was making decisions on his own and refused to change his mind.

“According to our sources, Putin still repeats the mantra about Russia being surrounded by enemies and the machinations of NATO. Talking to him is pointless,” Russian journalists Farida Rustamova and Maxim Tovkayolo wrote.

Russian state TV shows countdown to ‘signing ceremonies’

The formal annexation of Ukraine’s east and south would put the Kremlin in a position where it could frame Ukrainian attacks on those parts of the country as an attack on Russia itself: Mr Putin in a recent speech went as far as to hint about a nuclear strike if Kyiv continues to encroach on the Russian land.

Russian state TV, which has portrayed the annexation as an attempt to protect Ukrainians in those areas, on Thursday started showing a countdown to what they described as a “signing ceremonies on new territories joining Russia”.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, called an emergency session of the country’s Security and Defence Council on Thursday evening to discuss the annexation.

Mr Zelensky earlier this week dismissed the “voting” in the east and the south as a “farce that cannot even be called an imitation of referendums” and pledged to protect Ukrainians living there.

A close adviser of President Zelensky on Thursday mocked the upcoming annexation ceremony as a “Kremlin freak show”.

“This ceremony does not make any legal sense: the entities that don’t exist cannot join a country that is already falling apart,” Mikhailo Podolyak tweeted.

Ekaterina Schulmann, a leading Russian political scientist, said on Thursday that after the annexation “Russia as we knew it will enter a new stage of its existence to become a state with a de-legitimised border that includes fragments that not only will not be recognised by any other country of international organisation de juro but will not be controlled by the central government de-facto”.

“If I were talking to students, I would ask them to list a few more features of a failed state to get a bingo,” she wrote on social media.