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Senior Russian official backs referendums in Ukraine's Donbass region

Tuesday, 20 September 2022 4:58 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 20 September 2022 5:17 PM ]

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev

One of Russia's most senior security officials says he favors holding referendums in the breakaway Donbass region of eastern Ukraine in order to formally make them part of Russia.

Dmitry Medvedev, currently deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, in a social media post on Tuesday suggested that incorporating the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) and Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) into Russia would be an irreversible step once completed.

Anyone then attacking them would be assaulting Russia itself, which would be entitled to respond in self-defense.

"Encroachment onto Russian territory is a crime which allows you to use all the forces of self–defense," Medvedev said. "This is why these referendums are so feared in Kyiv and the West."

No future Russian leader would be able to constitutionally reverse the outcome of the votes, he wrote.

Medvedev, who also served as the president of Russia between 2008 and 2012 and prime minister between 2012 and 2020, further said the votes would alter the geopolitical landscape in Moscow's favor forever.

"They (the referendums) would completely change the vector of Russia's development for decades. And not just of our country. The geopolitical transformation of the world would be irreversible once the new territories were incorporated into Russia."

Meanwhile, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday it was up to the people living in the breakaway regions of Ukraine if they wanted to hold referendums on joining Russia.

"From the very beginning... we've been saying that the peoples of the respective territories should decide their fate," the top Russian diplomat said.

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Ukrainian forces claim to have marched farther east into areas abandoned by Russia, paving the way for fierce confrontation in the breakaway Donbas region as Kiev lobbies for more Western arms.

On February 24, Russia launched a military offensive against Ukraine with the declared objective of "demilitarizing" the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass, which is made up of Donetsk and Luhansk. In 2014, the two regions broke away from Ukraine.

Announcing the operation, President Vladimir Putin said the mission was meant to defend "people who for eight years are suffering persecution and genocide by the Kiev regime."

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