In an interview with RIA Novosti, a Russian state-owned domestic news agency, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday, 20 July, that the military could not rule out action in the southern parts of Ukraine, like the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions as well as "a number of other territories."
"We cannot allow the part of Ukraine controlled by [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky... to possess weapons that would pose a direct threat to our territory," Lavrov said, as quoted by the BBC.
Earlier, the expansion of Russian objectives had also been raised by US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, who had said on Tuesday that they are "seeing ample evidence in the intelligence and in the public domain that Russia intends to try to annex additional Ukrainian territory."
"Russia is beginning to roll out a version of what you could call an 'annexation playbook,' very similar to the one we saw in 2014," Kirby had added.
Lavrov has blamed the US and the West for provoking Russia by continously providing military assistance to Ukraine, accusing them of having a "desire to make things worse."
Russia is effectively in control of Luhansk in the Donbas region, with their focus completely on Donetsk at the moment. Donbas is a region that, before the Russian invasion, Ukraine controlled two-thirds of, despite the heavy fighting that has occurred there between its troops and pro-Russia separatists since 2014.
(With inputs from Reuters, the BBC, and The New York Times.)
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