Demilitarization and “de-Nazification.” Keeping Ukraine out of NATO. Preventing “genocide” in the Donbas. And now, a land grab, seizing territory with an eye toward incorporation into Russia. For the Kremlin, there have been various justifications and goals for its invasion of Ukraine, launched five months ago on July 24. For Ukraine, the response has been straightforward: defending its territory. For the West, however, the shifting rationales have required shifting responses, in helping Ukraine both fight the war and find some basis for negotiation. It’s not easy when your opponent keeps changing his tune. “They’re obviously making it up as they go along,” said Aglaya Snetkov, a lecturer in international politics at University College London and an editor of the Russian Analytical Digest. “They had a crazy plan, and then it didn’t work out, and then they had to adjust.” The latest iteration of the plan came on July 20, when Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that the Kremlin’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine had expanded beyond the eastern Donbas region, to include the southern-central regions of Zaporizhzhya and Kherson. Both those regions have been partially occupied by Russian troops since early in the war, though Ukrainian forces have been chipping away at Russian defensive lines in Kherson. “Now the geography is different,” Lavrov said. “It’s not just [Donetsk] and [Luhansk], it’s Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, and a number of other territories. And this is an ongoing process, consistent and insistent.” For weeks, there have been smaller signals that the Kremlin was taking creeping administrative steps — like handing out passports, installing puppet leadership, ordering stores to use Russia rubles — to lay the groundwork for Russian governance. The White House pointedly had a National Security Council official call out Russia on its plans this week. “Russia is beginning to roll out a version of what you could call an annexation playbook,” John Kirby said. He said he was “exposing” the Russian plans “so the world knows that any purported annexation is premeditated, illegal, and illegitimate.” In his interview, Lavrov also warned that the territorial goals could expand further if the West continued to supply long-range-rocket and artillery systems to Ukraine. Whether a wider land-grab actually happens is an open question. “I don’t see it meaning they’re going to change their military operations,” said Mark Cancian, senior adviser with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “Take over the whole country? Most of the country? There’s no way that’s going to happen. It looks like their operations have culminated in the Donbas.”
via rferl: For The Kremlin, The Ukraine Endgame Is A Moving Target