Russia Declares Expanded War Goals Beyond Ukraine’s Donbas

• Russia Declares Expanded War Goals Beyond Ukraine’s Donbas
  by Mark Trevelyan, https://www.reuters.com/
  * Foreign minister says geographical reality has changed
  * Russia may push deeper as West supplies long-range arms
  * Ukraine says comments show Russia aims to grab more land
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  LONDON, July 20 (Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Moscow’s military “tasks” in Ukraine now went beyond the eastern Donbas region, in the clearest acknowledgment yet that it has expanded its war goals.
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  In an interview with state media nearly five months after Russia’s invasion, the foreign minister also said peace talks made no sense at the moment because Western governments were leaning on Ukraine to fight rather than negotiate.
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  At that time, he said, the focus was on the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), self-styled breakaway entities in eastern Ukraine from which Russia has said it aims to drive out Ukrainian government forces.
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  “Now the geography is different, it’s far from being just the DPR and LPR, it’s also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories,” he said, referring to areas well beyond the Donbas that Russia has wholly or partly seized.
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