• Vladimir Putin will sign papers saying that Russia has annexed four regions of Ukraine.
• This is part of a rush by Moscow to secure territorial claims that the Ukrainian army is threatening to overturn on the battlefield.
• The annexation ceremony will take place in one of the Kremlin’s most impressive rooms.

President Vladimir Putin will sign official papers saying that Russia has taken over four regions of Ukraine, On Friday, This is part of a rush by Moscow to secure territorial claims that the Ukrainian army is threatening to overturn on the battlefield.

The move is one of the legal steps that Russia says will lead to the formal annexation of 15% of Ukraine’s land. It shows that Putin is stepping up his war against Ukraine even though he lost a big military battle this month.

After what Kyiv and Western countries say were fake referendums held under gunpoint on Ukrainian land that Russia controlled, the annexation has been rejected in the West as an illegal takeover of war-won land.

Washington and the European Union are going to put more sanctions on Russia because of this plan, and even some of Russia’s close traditional allies, like Serbia and Kazakhstan, say they won’t recognise the annexation.

Putin’s annexation ceremony will take place in one of the Kremlin’s most impressive rooms, with the pro-Russian leaders of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk, who Moscow thinks of as the leaders of the four Ukrainian regions. Russia says that the referendums were real and showed that people wanted the move to happen.

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed some details of the ceremony on Thursday. For days, people had been talking about how Russia would mark the annexation.

“On the accession of new territories into the Russian Federation,” Peskov said, “agreements will be signed with all four territories that held referendums and made similar requests to the Russian side.”

He also said that Putin would give a big speech on the subject.

On Friday, there will be a big rock concert on Moscow’s Red Square. A tribune with big video screens has already been set up, and billboards have been put up that say “Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson – Russia!”

Peskov didn’t say if Putin would show up at the concert or not. At a similar event in 2014, after Russia said it had taken over the Crimea region of Ukraine, he did the same thing.

Putin gave a speech last week in which he publicly supported the plans to annex Crimea. He also announced that hundreds of thousands of Russian reservists would be called up, and he said that if necessary, he would use nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory.

As tens of thousands of Russian men fled abroad to avoid Putin’s military call-up, Finland closed one of the few remaining routes to Europe by saying it would no longer let Russians enter by land with EU tourist visas.

The head of the Russian parliament’s upper house said that the chamber could talk about combining the four regions on October 4, three days before Putin turns 70.

What Russia is calling a celebration comes after Moscow’s worst losses of the war, when its forces in the northeast were pushed back.

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