Lavrov told an Arab summit in Cairo on Sunday that Moscow’s overarching goal in Ukraine is to free its people from its “unacceptable regime.”
He also suggested that Moscow’s war aims extend beyond the already occupied eastern and southern regions. “We will certainly help the Ukrainian people to get rid of the regime, which is absolutely anti-people and anti-historical,” Lavrov said.
Saturday, the UK Ministry of Defense suggested the wheels are turning on some of those plans. “Across the newly occupied territories in southern Ukraine, Russian-installed authorities are highly likely under increasing pressure from Moscow to consolidate their control over the region and prepare for referendums on joining Russia later in the year,” the ministry said in an intelligence update posted on Twitter. “Local authorities are likely coercing the population into disclosing personal details in order to compose voting registers.”
The first deputy head of the Kherson regional council, Yuri Sobolevsky, told residents to stay from away from Russian ammunition dumps. “The Ukrainian army is pouring it on against the Russians and this is only the beginning,” Sobolevsky wrote on the Telegram app.
The strikes potentially further isolate Russian forces west of the river from supplies in occupied Crimea and the east. The UK Ministry of Defense said Russia has resorted to pontoon bridges and a ferry system to compensate for destroyed bridges.
- Ukrainian and Russian officials continued to blame each other for the deaths of dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Olenivka, a separatist-controlled area of the country’s east. Separatist authorities and Russian officials said the attack killed 53 Ukrainian POWs and wounded another 75, figures that could not be independently confirmed. The Kyiv Independent reported that Ukraine’s Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said that Russia hasn’t yet responded to his request about the victims’ identities and the retrieval of their bodies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the deaths “a deliberate Russian war crime, a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war,” in a video address late Friday. “There should be a clear legal recognition of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.”
Moscow opened an investigation into the attack, sending a team to the site from Russia’s main criminal investigation agency. The state RIA Novosti agency reported that fragments of U.S.-supplied precision High Mobility Artillery Rocket System rockets were found at the site.
The Institute for the Study of War tweeted that “available visual evidence appears to support Ukrainian claims more than those of the Russians.” Ukraine has appealed to the International Criminal Court over the prison attack.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it has requested access to the prison “to determine the health and condition of all the people present on-site at the time of the attack.”