In an hour-long interview posted today with RT and Sputnik’s Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke about recent changes in Russia’s Ukrainian operation. Initially the liberation of the Donbass in Eastern Ukraine was a priority, he said, not only for the people who have been under attack from Kiev for the last eight years since the coup in Kiev, but also to protect against strikes into Russian territory. But as Ukraine has been supplied with increasingly longer-range missiles from the West, namely the medium-range HIMARS rockets which have a range of 80 km, what were previously considered to be the lines of demarcation to protect Russian territory from rocket attacks has changed, and now extends farther West into Ukrainian territory.
“Now the geography is different. It is far from being only the D.P.R. and L.P.R., it is also the Kherson region, the Zaporozhzhia region and a number of other territories, and this process continues, and continues consistently and persistently,” Lavrov said. Further, if the West delivers long-range rockets, such as the ATCMS which have a range of up to 300 km, then “the geographical objectives of the special operation in Ukraine will move further,” he said. The full interview is already posted to the Russian page of the Foreign Ministry website (https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1822901/), and an English-dubbed video is posted to RT. (https://www.rt.com/russia/559308-lavrov-full-interview-rt/)
The Biden Administration has so far denied Ukrainian requests for supplying longer-range rockets. However, the words of Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov during his live July 19 conversation with former U.S. Ambassador to Kiev at the Atlantic Council should be noted: “These decisions will come easier after our partners are sure that we fulfill every obligation and effectively use all the equipment we have already received,” he bragged. “In November 2021, I was told in Washington, D.C., that we would never get Stingers because that simply wasn’t possible. It was forbidden by the law. That story was repeated over and over again.” Ukraine has now received over 1,400 Stinger rockets from the U.S. (https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/ukraines-defense-minister-with-the-right-weapons-russia-can-definitely-be-defeated/)
