evidence: At a ceremony attended by Russian-installed heads of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, Russian President Valdimir Putin signed four separate agreements on the admission of new territories to the Russian Federation. Ahead of the announcement, Putin on Thursday formally recognized Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as independent states. [...] That included large parts of the north, such as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and a corridor of territory that reached to the edge of Kyiv. Russian forces also took large swathes of the south, especially in the agriculturally-rich Kherson region. [...] And with the recent announcement, the Kremlin has set itself an objective of expanding that territory to incorporate those parts of the four regions it sees as annexed into Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed on Friday that the "entire territory" of Ukraine would be liberated, calling Russia’s "attempted annexation" a "farce."