Washington believes Russia is preparing to annex large swaths of southern and eastern Ukraine, a senior US diplomat said Monday.
“We believe that Russia will try to annex the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic into so-called Russia,” said Michael Carpenter, US ambassador to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
He added that the US has reports indicating that “Russia has plans to engineer referenda on joining Russia sometime in mid-May and that Moscow is considering a similar plan for Kherson,” in tactics he described as “straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook.”
Russia had previously staged independence referendums in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014. The US assessed that it has similar plans for the Ukrainian city of Kherson, which Russia occupied in early March, Carpenter said.
“Just as Russia engineered these quasi statelets, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic, now, we believe that the Kremlin may be trying to organise a Kherson People’s Republic in the Kherson Oblast of southern Ukraine,” he said.
Carpenter declined to provide more details about the reports, citing the US desire to protect sources and methods, but he said they were “highly credible.”
The US and its partners would not consider such referenda or attempts to annex Ukrainian territory as legitimate, he said.