Russia says its goal is to control southern Ukraine as well as Donbas

Russia has revealed that the aim of its invasion of Ukraine is to take “full management” over southern Ukraine in addition to the jap Donbas area.

The announcement by a prime army official marks the primary time Russia admitted it was preventing to ascertain a land hall via Ukrainian territory connecting Russia to Crimea, the peninsula it annexed in 2014.

“For the reason that starting of the second section of the particular operation, which started actually two days in the past, one of many duties of the Russian military is to ascertain full management over Donbas and southern Ukraine. It will present a land hall to Crimea,” Maj. Gen. Rustam Minnekaev, the performing commander of Russia’s Central Navy District, stated in line with TASS, a Russian state information company.

Minnekaev, talking on the annual common assembly of the Union of Protection Trade Enterprises of the Sverdlovsk area, was quoted by TASS as saying the goal was to create a land hall between Ukraine’s jap Donbas area and Crimea.

He added that management over Ukraine’s south would give Russian forces entry to Transnistria, a separatist statelet in Moldova, the place a contingent of Russian forces has been stationed because the early Nineteen Nineties.

Russian forces at current have solely partial management of southern Ukraine, with the Ukrainian authorities nonetheless accountable for the important thing cities of Mykolaiv and Odesa and a few Ukrainian forces holding out in a metal plant within the encircled port of Mariupol.

Russia in latest weeks withdrew its forces in northern Ukraine after a failure to take Kyiv, with Russian army officers claiming that their strategic objectives had shifted to taking all the jap Donbas area.

Requested by reporters Friday to elaborate on what territories had been meant by southern Ukraine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to remark and referred inquiries to the Ministry of Protection.

Ukrainian authorities have warned in latest days that Russian forces occupying the southern Ukrainian metropolis of Kherson had been planning to stage a sham referendum declaring a so-called “Kherson Individuals’s Republic” within the coming days, mirroring the Russian-backed creation of separatist republics in Donbas in 2014 that set the stage for Russia’s invasion on February 24.