Russia Calls Its Military Operation Targets In Ukraine Widespread, US: Any Annexation By Force Is A Violation And We Will Not Allow It!

Menlu Russia Sergei Lavrov. (Wikimedia Commons/Press Service of the President of the Russian Federation)

JAKARTA - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said his military duties in Ukraine are now expanding, no longer just around the Donbas region, when Moscow troops are intensively shelling eastern and southern Ukraine.

In an interview with RIA, 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 assignment 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.

"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.

Separately, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia rejects diplomacy and wants "blood, not talk".

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.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a meeting of allies that the United States would send four more HIMARS to Ukraine, with the number of advanced weapons coming to 16 in Ukraine.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and supports the breakaway Russian-speaking entity, the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republic (DPR and LPR), in the provinces, collectively known as the Donbas.