Over the last 24 hours, first Russia’s Constitutional Court ruled upon the four treaties on the accession of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (D.P.R. and L.P.R.) and the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, and found that all four were in complete compliance with the Constitution. This was a necessary hurdle before the treaties were allowed to be presented to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, where today the Deputies voted them up. Tomorrow they are to be taken up by the Senators in the Federation Council, the Federal Assembly upper house.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the Duma today that the Kiev regime had oppressed Russian-speaking people, which made the existence of certain territories within the Ukrainian state impossible, and that the acceptance of the four regions into Russia would “serve the interests of all people of our multiethnic country.” State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin contended that the only way to save the people living in the four former Ukrainian territories from the artillery attacks of the Ukrainian troops was to accept the “reunification.” (http://duma.gov.ru/en/news/55407/ )
