NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, is to hold a press briefing at alliance headquarters at Brussels Friday evening “in view of Russia’s planned illegal annexations of Ukrainian territory,” a NATO press officer has told the Sun. The details of the secretary general’s planned remarks were not immediately known. 

Underscoring the gravity of the Kremlin’s impending attempt to solidify its land grabs, and the urgency of formulating a response, the Brussels briefing appears to have been scheduled only on Friday morning.

Russia’s attempted annexations of four occupied regions of Ukraine will be formalized Friday at a ceremony at the Kremlin, at which President Putin is expected to deliver what the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has called a “major” speech. The Agence France-Presse reported that “the four regions’ Kremlin-installed leaders who pleaded to Putin for annexation this week”  had assembled in the Russian capital ahead of the ceremony, and that their “almost simultaneous” requests came after they claimed residents had unanimously backed the move in sketchy referendums dismissed by Kyiv and the West as bogus.

The regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south of Ukraine, together with Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, known as the Donbass, make up some 20 percent of Ukraine’s total territory. In his nightly video address to Ukrainians on Thursday, President Zelensky said Russia “will not get a new territory of Ukraine. Russia will annex itself to the catastrophe that it has brought to the occupied territory of our country.”

Mr. Putin’s ruthlessness was on display in Ukraine on the very day of the manufactured pomp and pseudo-circumstance at Moscow. The Kyiv Independent reported that on Friday morning Russian troops launched a missile attack on a line of civilian cars on the way out of a regional center in Zaporizhzhia, killing 23 civilians  and injuring 28 more. The newspaper reported that according to the Zaporizhzhia regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, “People stood in line to enter the temporarily occupied territory, to pick up their relatives, to bring aid,” when they came under Russian attack.

The AP reported that the Zaporizhzhia strike killed 25 people, but with a rescue operation ongoing it is to be expected that the number of casualties may rise.  The news agency also reported that Russia “pounded an unspecified number of Ukrainian cities with missiles, rockets and suicide drones … as it moved to fold more seized Ukrainian territory into Russia itself and under the protection of its nuclear umbrella, opening an internationally condemned dangerous new phase of the seven-month war.”

Analysts have warned, according to AP,  that Mr. Putin is likely to dip more heavily into his dwindling stocks of precision weapons and step up attacks as part of a strategy to escalate the war to an extent that would shatter Western support for Ukraine. 

NATO press officer Irina Novakova did not specify what other topics will be discussed at Brussels. Friday evening’s briefing also comes amid mounting speculation that Moscow was behind this week’s explosions and subsequent gas leaks at two major undersea pipelines that run between Russian and Germany.  The Telegraph reported that “Russian Navy support ships, a warship and submarines were spotted close to the Nord Stream pipeline” ahead of the explosions on Tuesday. 

Methane gas is reportedly still leaking from the badly damaged pipelines, and repairs could take months. In a press statement yesterday, the North Atlantic Council said that “the damage to the Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2 pipelines in international waters in the Baltic Sea is of deep concern. All currently available information indicates that this is the result of deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage.”

The American ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith, hinted at a forthcoming NATO response to Russia’s alleged misdeeds in the Baltic Sea. In remarks to a reporter at Brussels yesterday, Ms. Smith reiterated the alliance’s stance that any deliberate attack on critical allied infrastructure would be met with a united and decisive response. “Every NATO announcement must be agreed upon by all 30 allies,” Ms. Smith said. “The 30 allies got together and decided they needed to send a message. These words were chosen deliberately: a united and decisive response.”