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What did Russia's annexation laws change by 6 October 2022?
Summary
A look back at the legal steps Moscow completed in the days before 6 October 2022 to claim four Ukrainian regions.
What had Russia actually done by 6 October 2022, and how had it got there? The answer lay in two formal steps taken in the preceding days.
On 4 October 2022, the Federation Council of Russia unanimously approved the annexation of Ukraine's Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. As reported at the time, the documents still needed final signing by President Vladimir Putin.
That signature followed on 5 October 2022. Putin signed a law formally annexing the Donetsk People's Republic, the Luhansk People's Republic, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia into Russia.
What the sequence showed
By 6 October 2022, the process had moved from parliamentary approval to presidential signature within a single day. The unanimous vote in the upper chamber on 4 October 2022 left only the final step, and that step was completed the next day.
The legal act covered four separate territories at once, naming two of them as people's republics and two by their regional names. In formal terms, Moscow had completed its side of the paperwork by the covered date.
