A senior Russian military commander said Russia aimed to seize the whole of Ukraine’s Donbas region and capture territory linking it to the annexed Crimean peninsula.
Russian troops began a “second phase” of the war “two days ago” and “one of the Russian army’s tasks is establishing total control of the Donbas and southern Ukraine”, Rustam Minnekayev, acting commander of Russia’s central military district, was quoted as saying on Friday by Interfax.
Minnekayev added that controlling southern Ukraine would open “another way to Transnistria”, a separatist enclave in Moldova where a small Russian contingent is based and where he claimed “there are also instances of oppressing the Russian-speaking population”.
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