Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register LONDON, July 20 (Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Moscow’s military “tasks” in Ukraine now extend beyond the eastern Donbass region, in the clearest admission yet that its war aims have expanded over the past five months. In an interview with the state-run RIA Novosti news agency, Lavrov said the geographical reality had changed since Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held peace talks in Turkey in late March, which failed to produce a breakthrough. At the time, he said, the focus was on the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), self-proclaimed breakaway entities in eastern Ukraine from which Russia has said it intends to expel Ukrainian government forces. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register “Now the geography is different, it’s far from just DPR and LPR, it’s also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories,” he said, referring to territories far beyond the Donbas that the Russian forces have fully or partially occupied. “This process continues logically and persistently,” he said, adding that Russia may have to push even deeper. If the West, out of “impotent rage” or out of a desire to further aggravate the situation, continued to pump Ukraine with long-range weapons, such as the American high-mobility artillery missile systems (HIMARS), “this means that the geographical tasks will expand yet. farther than the current line,” Lavrov said. Russia could not allow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy “or whoever replaces him” to threaten its territory or the LPR and the LPR with its longer-range systems, he said – referring casually, and without any evidence, to the possibility that the Ukrainian leader may not remain in power. The foreign minister is the highest-ranking figure to speak openly about Russia’s war aims in territorial terms, nearly five months after President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion with a denial that Russia intended to occupy its neighbor. Putin said at the time that his goal was to demilitarize and “de-profitize” Ukraine – a statement dismissed by Kyiv and the West as a pretext for an imperialist-style war of expansion. After being defeated in an initial attempt to capture the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Russia’s Defense Ministry said on March 25 that the first phase of its “special military operation” had been completed and would now focus on “achieving the main goal, the liberation of Donbas.” . Nearly four months later, it has captured Luhansk, one of the two regions that make up Donbas, but is far from capturing the other, Donetsk. In recent weeks it has stepped up rocket attacks on cities across Ukraine. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Written by Mark Trevelyan. Editor: Catherine Evans Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
