In a move that follows a plodding and predictable script Russia will recognise the four territories it has occupied and captured in conquest.
Under the country’s 1993 constitution there needed to be a popular vote for this to happen – hence the hurried fake referenda.
Like other autocratic police states, pseudo- legalism is of the utmost importance in Russia – we’ll hear a lot more turgid legal language today as a way of giving this international outrage a veneer of legitimacy.
Moving to annex Russia has overturned centuries of convention – that you don’t steal land with force.
Putin is also returning Europe to a period pre-WW2.
For the Kremlin though there’s logic and need.
Domestically the annexation allows Putin more room to argue that Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ is not an offensive but a defensive manoeuvre.
There was no invasion.
Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson are now, according to Putin, part of the motherland.
Mobilisation is therefore not only justified but necessary to fight off a wider attack by the west.
The Kremlin is signalling it is now battling not a limited war but an unlimited existential war.
That’s the sale to the public.
What he’s hawking to the west is a bit more nuclear blackmail.
As part of Russia these four occupied regions will fall under Moscow’s nuclear umbrella – is it worth WW3 by continuing to support Ukraine?
And in the upside-down world of Putin’s Russia reality doesn’t matter.
The fact that Russian forces don’t even control all of the areas he’s about to annex – which is about the size of Portugal – can be glossed over.
The war of liberation continues and even if it means bombing his own new subjects.
This morning in what appears to be another egregious Russian war crime a convoy of civilians were killed in a missile attack.
At the time of writing 28 are wounded and 25 dead according to officials in Ukraine.
The bigger picture of all of this is that this crisis just got a bit worse.
Putin is signposting that – despite manpower shortages and major setbacks on the battlefield – he’s not giving up.
Any chance of a negotiated settlement is now non-existent.
Source: Alex Rossi, Sky News international correspondent