Ljubljana - The newspaper Delo says in its commentary on Friday that the annexation by Russia of four Ukrainian regions will allow Russian President Vladimir Putin a tactical change from a colonial and imperial war to a defence war. Peace in Ukraine seems more unlikely today than any time since the start of the war.

Declaring the four occupied regions Russian will make the Ukrainian army a foreign force on its own territory, while Moscow will cunningly start using the vocabulary of a victim, and Putin will continue threatening to use nuclear weapons.

It is clear that Russia is in a great hurry. Putin tried to compensate for the "military and strategic ordeal" around Kharkiv with a completely chaotic mobilisation, as well as the referenda in the occupied regions in the middle of the war, so as to annex the stolen territories as fast as possible.

Such brutal and very risky moves by Russia are pushing Ukraine and its western allies not to the negotiating table but into all-out war, the paper says under the headline Putin's Endlessly Risky War.