Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Moscow’s military “tasks” in Ukraine went beyond the eastern Donbas region, in the clearest recognition so far that its war targets are ‘have expanded in the last five months.
In an interview with state news agency RIA Novosti, Lavrov said geographical realities had changed since Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held peace talks in Turkey in late March that made no progress.
At the time, he said, the focus was on the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), so-called separatist entities in eastern Ukraine from which Russia has said it intends to expel government forces from Ukraine.
“Now the geography is different, it’s far from just the DPR and the LPR, it’s also the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories,” he said, referring to territories far beyond the Donbas that the Russian forces have occupied all or part of it.
“This process continues in a logical and persistent way,” he said, adding that Russia could have to dig even deeper.
If the West, out of “impotent rage” or a desire to further aggravate the situation, continued to bomb Ukraine with long-range weapons such as high-mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) manufactured in the United States, “this will to say that geographical tasks will extend even further from the current line, “Lavrov said.
Russia could not allow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “or whoever replaces him” to threaten his territory or that of the DPR and the LPR with long-range systems, he said, referring casually, and without any evidence, to the possibility that the Ukrainian leader may not remain in power.
War objectives
The foreign minister is the highest-ranking figure to speak openly about Russia’s war goals in territorial terms, nearly five months after President Vladimir Putin began his invasion with a denial that Russia intended to occupy its neighbor.
Putin then said his goal was to demilitarize and “de-Nazize” Ukraine, a statement rejected by Kyiv and the West as a pretext for an imperial-style expansion war.
After being rejected in a first attempt to take the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Russia’s Defense Ministry said on March 25 that the first phase of its “special military operation” was complete and would now focus on “achieving the ‘main goal, the liberation of Donbas.’
Nearly four months later, it has taken Luhansk, one of the two regions that make up the Donbas, but is still far from capturing the other, Donetsk. In recent weeks has increased missile attacks on Ukrainian cities.
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