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What Russia's annexation law of 5 October 2022 completed
Summary
A retrospective on the final legal step that Russia took to claim four Ukrainian regions.
What did Russia finish on 5 October 2022? President Vladimir Putin signed a law formally annexing the Donetsk People's Republic, the Luhansk People's Republic, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia into Russia.
The signature closed a short legislative sequence. On 4 October 2022, the Federation Council of Russia unanimously approved the annexation of the four regions. At that point, the annexation documents were awaiting only the president's final signing, which followed the next day.
What the sequence showed
The two steps, a unanimous vote in the upper chamber and then a presidential signature on consecutive days, left the process complete on paper. The law covered four regions of Ukraine: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
The measure was part of the annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It named the regions as being taken into Russia, which is the claim at the centre of the measure.
