JAKARTA - Director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) William Burns believes that Russia must learn from its failure to control Kyiv, when the country's foreign minister announced that the target area for its troops in Ukraine was expanding.
Burns said at least for now the concentration of Russian military forces in the Donbas showed that they had learned from the failures at the start of the campaign, where Moscow stalled and failed in its attempts to seize control of Kyiv.
"On the one hand, what the Russian military has done is retreat to a more comfortable means of war, in a sense, by using their superiority and long-range firepower to defend and effectively destroy Ukrainian targets and to compensate for the weakness of human resources that they still have," said Burns as quoted by Reuters on July 21.
As previously reported, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that his military duties in Ukraine are now expanding, no longer just around the Donbas region, when Moscow troops are intensely shelling eastern and southern Ukraine.
In an interview with RIA, the state news agency, Novosti Lavrov also said Moscow's goals would develop further if the West continued to supply Kyiv with long-range weapons such as the US-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).
"That means the geographic task will extend further than the current line," he said.
Lavrov's comments are the clearest acknowledgment that Russia's war goals have evolved over the five months of the war.
The United States, which said Tuesday it saw signs Russia was preparing to formally annex the territory it had seized in Ukraine, vowed to oppose annexation.
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"Once again, we have made it clear that violent annexation would be a grave violation of the United Nations Charter, and we will not let it go unpunished. We will not allow it to go unpunished," State Department spokesman Ned Price said.
Meanwhile in Washington, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said the Donbas region had not disappeared from Russia. The Ukrainian troops withdrew from Lugansk earlier this month.
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