Russia is planning to annex Ukrainian territory under its control, the White House warned on Tuesday.
Specifically, the Russians will look to annex the city of Kherson and all of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby said during a White House press briefing.
“Russia is laying the groundwork to annex Ukrainian territory that it controls in direct violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. You’re seeing ample evidence in the intelligence and in the public domain that Russia intends to try to annex additional Ukrainian territory. Russia is beginning to roll out a version of what you could call an annexation playbook,” he said. “Very similar to the one we saw in 2014.”
The Kremlin has not decided on a timeline for these referenda, but proxies in the areas have said that it will happen sometime this year.
BIDEN EXECUTIVE ORDER ALLOWS AGENCIES TO SANCTION FOR WRONGFUL DETENTION ABROAD
Russian forces have “taken control of broadcasting towers, [have established] loyalty security forces, replacing telecommunications infrastructure, forcing women to apply for Russian citizenship and issuing Russian passports versus also installing loyalists in areas of Ukraine,” the former Pentagon spokesperson explained.
The administration will announce a new military aid package later this week, Kirby added, noting that it will include Lockheed Martin’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems. The U.S. has already provided a dozen HIMARS, though earlier in the day, Ukrainian Minister of Defense Oleksii Reznikov said his country needs at least 55 to “effectively hold back the enemy” or “at least 100” to launch an “effective counterattack.”
The administration has previously warned about the possibility of Russian annexations.
“We still believe that the Kremlin is waiting for an opportunity to try to annex the Kherson region to Russia,” U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Michael Carpenter said on June 10. “We believe a sham referendum is one possibility. Another is to have one of the Kremlin’s proxies in the region petition Moscow for annexation. So to be perfectly clear, the population of Kherson wants absolutely nothing to do with the brutal occupation regime that Russia is trying to impose.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Iran on Tuesday after U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan informed the public last week that Russia was looking to buy “hundreds” of unmanned aerial vehicles from Iran and that Russian officials have already taken two trips there.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
While Kirby said the Pentagon doesn’t have “any indications that the sale has actually occurred,” he stressed that even the meetings demonstrate the toll the war in Ukraine is taking on Russia’s military and its industrial base.
Putin met with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Tehran and with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
