Putin gets green light from Federation Council to use Russian army abroad
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been authorized to deploy Russian military forces abroad, after a unanimous decision from the Federation Council of the Russian Federation, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, on Feb. 22.
The speaker of the Federation Council, Valentina Matvienko, earlier announced that the Council had received an appeal from Putin about the use of the Russian army abroad.
She stated that the appeal had already been considered by the relevant committees of the Council.
This comes a day after Putin addressed the nation and announced the recognition of the "independence" of the self-declared "people’s republics"of Luhansk and Donetsk, in the non-government-controlled parts of Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Earlier, the leaders of the Russian-backed statelets announced a "general mobilization" and relocation of part of the population from the occupied Donbas to Russia, amid the looming threat of a further Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Since the end of October 2021, Russia has been massing troops next to Ukraine’s borders.
The U.S. ambassador to the OSCE, Michael Carpenter, said on Feb. 21 that Russia has arrayed between 169,000 and 190,000 troops on the Russian-Ukrainian and Belarusian-Ukrainian border, and in the temporarily occupied territories of Crimea and the Donbas.
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