Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Russia’s goals were more ambitious than Moscow stated at the start of the war in February, when it claimed its aim was to “liberate” the eastern border region of Donbass. Moscow’s war aims now extend to Kherson and Zaporizhia provinces in southern Ukraine, which are mostly held by Russian forces, Lavrov said. The Donbas region is now largely under the control of two Moscow-backed separatist groups in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, denied at the start of the war that Moscow had ambitions to take over more of Ukraine, despite a failed assault on Kyiv in the first weeks of the invasion. However, Lavrov said the collapse of peace talks in the spring meant “the geography is different now”. He told the state-run RIA Novosti news network: “It’s only the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, it’s also Kherson, Zaporizhia and a number of other regions.” Lavrov warned that Russia could go even further in what he called “an ongoing process” if the West continued to supply Ukraine with advanced weapons. The comments were the highest official indication nearly five months after the invasion of Ukraine that Russia intends to seize more territory. His statement came after the White House warned on Tuesday that Russia was using an “annexation book” that included “fake referendums” to claim that people in the occupied territories wanted to join Russia. The annexations would likely be based on Russia’s 2014 seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, when it claimed a referendum showed an overwhelming majority of residents had voted in favor of Russian rule. Since peace talks to end the war collapsed in April, Putin has said he sees no prospect of a settlement and seems determined to seize as much territory as possible, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Since then, Russia has appointed separatist officials to run the regions of southern Ukraine it controls, who have said they will make the ruble the region’s official currency and hold referendums on joining Russia. Several senior officials from Putin’s United Russia party visited the region and claimed that “Russia is here forever.” Ukraine said the moves showed Russia was never serious about peace talks and had always planned to effectively end the country’s existence in its current form. Lavrov warned on Wednesday that Russia would step up its efforts further if the West continued to supply Ukraine with long-range weapons such as the US Himars missile launcher system. “If the West continues to pump Ukraine full of weapons out of impotent rage or a desire to make the situation worse [ . . .] then that means our geographic tasks will move even further away from the current line,” he added.