Nicaragua Recognizes Russia’s Claims to Occupied Ukraine

Nicaragua announced on Thursday that it recognizes Russia’s sovereignty over four Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims through widely condemned sham referendums.

In late 2022, Russia declared the annexation of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia regions after staging so-called referendums in occupied territories. It then amended its constitution to formally claim these areas as new Russian oblasts.

Kyiv and Western governments said the votes breached international law and ruled them as illegitimate and non-representative.

Russian propaganda outlet Russia Today (RT), citing a letter from Nicaraguan co-presidents Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, reported on Thursday that the Central American nation has recognized Moscow’s land grab in Ukraine.

“On behalf of the Government and people of Nicaragua, we express our full support and recognition of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporozhye regions as an integral part of the territory of the Russian Federation,” the two said, according to RT.

The two reportedly praised Russian troops for their “defense… of world peace” through their invasion of Ukraine.

“We stand in solidarity with the Russian families who have sacrificed the lives of their loved ones in defense of the Russian people and world peace,” their letter states.

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Nicaragua, the Kremlin’s longtime ally from the late days of the Cold War, became one of the first nations to fully recognize Moscow’s land grab in Ukraine.

Syria, before the fall of the Moscow-backed Assad regime, had recognized the independence of the two Moscow proxy states in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

North Korea, one of Moscow’s newfound allies after 2022, endorsed Moscow’s sham referenda at the time.

Despite Moscow’s claims on the four regions, it does not exert full control over three of them at the time of publication. While most of the Luhansk region is under Russian control, it has thus far failed to capture the entirety of the Donetsk region, with only a limited presence in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.

Nicaragua has also aligned itself with Moscow and its fellow allies when voting on UN resolutions condemning Moscow’s invasion, maintaining a pro-Russian stance for more than a decade.

In 2014, it was one of the countries that recognized Russia’s claim on Crimea soon after Moscow’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula.

In 2020, close to two years before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv had imposed sectoral sanctions against Nicaragua due to its decision to open a consulate in occupied Crimea.