Russia has revealed that the goal of its invasion of Ukraine is to gain “complete control” over both southern Ukraine and the eastern Donbas region.
The announcement by a senior military official marks the first time Russia admitted it was fighting to establish a land corridor through Ukrainian territory connecting Russia to Crimea, the peninsula it annexed in 2014.
“Since the start of the second phase of the special operation, which started literally two days ago, one of the tasks of the Russian army has been to establish full control over Donbas and southern Ukraine. This will provide a land corridor to Crimea said May. General Rustam Minnekaev, the acting commander of Russia’s Central Military District, said according to TASS, a Russian state news agency.
Speaking at the annual general meeting of the Union of Defense Industry Enterprises in the Sverdlovsk region, Minnekaev said the goal was to create a land corridor between Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and Crimea.
He added that control of southern Ukraine would give Russian troops access to Transnistria, a separatist state in Moldova, where a contingent of Russian troops has been stationed since the early 1990s.
Russian forces currently only have partial control over southern Ukraine, with the Ukrainian government still in control of the main cities of Mykolaiv and Odessa and some Ukrainian troops holding out at a steel mill in the surrounded port of Mariupol.
Russia has withdrawn its forces in northern Ukraine in recent weeks after a failure to take Kiev, with Russian military officials claiming their strategic goals had shifted to taking the entire eastern Donbas region.
Asked by reporters Friday to explain which areas were referred to as southern Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment and referred questions to the Defense Ministry.
Ukrainian authorities have warned in recent days that Russian forces occupying the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson planned to hold a mock referendum in the coming days to declare a so-called “Kherson People’s Republic”, a reflection of the Russian-backed establishment of separatist republics in Donbas in 2014 that set the stage for the Russian invasion on February 24.
