With annexation plans, Putin escalates battle of wills with the West

President Vladimir Putin plans to carry out his threat Friday to declare that some 40,000 square miles of eastern and southern Ukraine will become part of Russia, an illegal annexation denounced by the West, but a signal that the Russian leader is prepared to raise the stakes in the 7-month-old war against Ukraine.

It is not clear whether even Russia’s staunchest allies will recognise Putin’s move, and Russian forces only partly control the land he plans to claim. But by annexing the parts of Ukraine his troops still occupy and then framing his efforts as an existential fight for the survival of the Russian state, Putin can try to shift the focus of the war from his army’s front-line losses to a plane where he seems to feel most confident: A battle of wills with the West.

“He thinks he can win,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a phone interview from Moscow. “He is provoking an escalation of the war, transferring it to some new status.”

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Responding to rising popular discontent over the draft he ordered last week, Putin publicly directed senior security officials to send home people who had been wrongly drafted.

“All mistakes must be corrected and prevented from happening in the future,” Putin said in televised remarks to his Security Council. “You need to figure all this out — without fuss, calmly but quickly, in detail and thoroughly.”

The Kremlin announced the annexation plans Thursday, saying Putin would sign documents on the entry of new territories into the Russian Federation and give “a voluminous speech.”

The ceremony will be accompanied by a festive celebration.

Festivities aside, Putin’s declaration will signal a new and more dangerous phase of the war. Once he declares Ukrainian territory to be an inextricable part of Russia he will rule out any negotiations over that area’s future status, analysts said.

And after going through with the annexation, Putin may also declare that any future Ukrainian military action there threatens Russian territorial integrity — a threat, he said last week, to which Russia’s nuclear-armed military may respond with “all the means at our disposal.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday condemned the Kremlin’s plans, saying they were part of “a futile effort to mask what amounts to a further attempt at a land grab in Ukraine.”