Six months after invading Ukraine, Russia has admitted for the first time that its war goal is to overthrow President Volodymyr Zelensky from power in Kiev.
“Russians and Ukrainians will continue to live together, and we will certainly help the Ukrainian people get rid of the regime,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, for whom Moscow is determined to help its neighbors “get rid of the burden of this regime absolutely unacceptable”.
The phrase was said on Sunday (24) to diplomats during an Arab League summit in Cairo. According to news agencies, Lavrov again accused the West of having inflated Ukraine against Russia, allegedly with the aim of provoking war.
The admission of a jumping jack secret is quite significant given the current stage of the conflict, which began on February 24 with attacks on multiple fronts against Ukrainian forces on the orders of President Vladimir Putin.
At that moment, the Russian suggested actions that clearly indicated the will to overthrow Zelensky: he said that the operation was aimed at “demilitarizing and denazifying” his neighbor, whom he accused of protecting neo-Nazi-oriented politicians, and “liberating Donbass”—the Russian-speaking east to Ukraine.
Putin even incited the Ukrainian military against Zelensky, but never directly advocated his removal. His actions, of course, were in the opposite direction: in three days of war there were Russian soldiers on the outskirts of Kiev.
The initial impulse, however, was flawed, with divergent fronts and little concentration of forces. Tough Ukrainian resistance to Russian bad tactics ended up thwarting the idea of ​​a takeover of the Ukrainian capital that would lead to the collapse of the Zelensky government.
The United States, after suggesting to the Ukrainian president to flee the country, then began to lead a campaign to supply Western weapons to Ukraine. It is a gradual process, associated with the harsh but hitherto relatively ineffective sanctions regime against Moscow, due to the fear of a direct clash between NATO (Western military alliance) with the Russians.
Amid initial negotiations to try to contain the conflict, Russia then said it had no interest in overthrowing Zelensky or occupying Ukraine. Its stated objective, one of the strategic reasons for the war, was to keep its neighbor out of NATO and other Western structures.
The modulation of discourse in the face of reality on the battlefield now seems to have taken the opposite path. Six months later, Russia reorganized and established a position of strength in the Donbass and the south of the country, joining the region with Crimea, a peninsula that Putin had annexed without firing a shot in 2014.
Last week, it fell to Lavrov to begin to spell out the current plans, saying that Russian ambition extended to the Ukrainian south. That whole strip is seen in Russian nationalist circles as historically a domain of Moscow, and is called New Russia.
The question is whether Putin would seek accommodation after advancing on the rest of the Donetsk province that is under Kiev’s control, thus completing the takeover of Donbass, or if he would seek to expand his invasion to the rest of the southern Ukrainian coast – starting with the port of Odessa. which continues to bomb, despite the agreement to export grain dammed there.
In April, a Russian general suggested uniting the entire region under Moscow’s command to Transnistria, a strip of about 500,000 people in Moldova that is a Russian protectorate, one of the unburied corpses of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Judging by the escalation of ambitions painted by Lavrov, Putin wants more — or is moving up the ante on the table with an eye on future negotiations.
Be that as it may, the chancellor’s statements fit like a glove for Zelensky, who is facing a moment of extreme fatigue among his Western allies due to the economic and political impact of the war in Europe, to try to galvanize support in the face of the reading that Moscow finally wants only the total submission of Ukraine — and that may not stop there.
