Putin quietly ramps up war goals while world distracted by Iran

Telegraph

9 hours ago

Vladimir Putin appears to have shifted his war aims to once again include conquering all of Ukraine as his forces accelerate gains on the front lines.
The Russian president announced that 'all of Ukraine is ours' last week as the world's attention was drawn to the conflict in the Middle East and Iran's nuclear programme.
'Wherever the Russian soldier treads is ours,' he told an economic forum in St Petersburg as his forces attempted to push into Sumy, despite not being one of the four regions he annexed in 2022.
Meanwhile, peace talks have further stalled, with Putin saying they are 'nowhere close' to success after efforts by Donald Trump fizzled out.
On Monday, Putin's forces said that they had taken the final sliver of Luhansk after controlling about 99 per cent of the region for several years.
If confirmed, Luhansk would become the first Ukrainian region to fall fully under Russian control since Putin annexed Crimea in 2014.
But Putin's ambitions now appear to go far beyond Luhansk and the three other regions he illegally annexed in September 2022.
If state media claims are accurate, Russian forces have also seized their first village in the Dnipropetrovsk region – a territory Ukraine has never previously had to defend from invading ground troops. Tens of thousands of troops are also massing around Sumy and Kharkiv, two northern regions not included in the 2022 annexation.
The intensification of operations across Ukraine comes as US-led efforts to broker peace between Moscow and Kyiv appear to have stalled.
Two rounds of direct talks took place in May and June, but yielded little beyond agreements to exchange prisoners of war and repatriate the dead.
Russia's decision to annexe Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in 2022 was, in part, a recalibration after it failed to take Kyiv. By narrowing its goals to eastern Ukraine, Moscow hoped to present a more realistic path to victory.
Yet it has taken nearly three years to claim full control of Luhansk – if that claim proves true – despite starting the war with a large portion of the region already occupied.
Now, the shift back to a wider campaign is unmistakable. Renewed offensives around Kharkiv and Sumy, both targeted unsuccessfully in the early months of the war, point to a new escalation.
Angelica Evans, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), said Putin's revised ambitions began resurfacing when he visited Kursk in May and ordered the creation of a 'buffer zone' along the Ukrainian border.
'That was a light way to introduce that into the information space. First, it's a buffer zone, it's just 30km to protect Russians,' she told The Telegraph.
'Then you're not that far from major regional cities, so why not take those? Because [Putin thinks] 'isn't it our right to take those, because they're historic Russian cities'. It's slow-rolling what I think we eventually will see … a return to an acknowledgement to take all of Ukraine.'
Putin's apparent shift in strategy may also explain the recent uptick in strikes on civilian areas. In Kyiv, 18 people were killed in a missile strike on an apartment block, while 17 died while travelling on a civilian train in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
'The desire to strike these places has always been there,' said Ms Evans.
'A lot of these strikes are about undermining Ukrainian morale and for some of these settlements, that are closer to the frontline, an effort to convince people to leave and to make it easier in the future to seize these places. There's some really long-term objectives at play.'
The reported seizure of Dachne in Dnipropetrovsk, if confirmed, would be especially troubling for Volodymyr Zelensky. In more than a decade of conflict with Kremlin-backed separatists and Russian troops, Ukraine has never had to fight in this region.
One Ukrainian military source previously warned that the flat terrain and sparse settlements could allow for a swift Russian advance. It would also come at a time when Russia is advancing at its fastest pace since November.
The Russian army took 588 sq km (227 sq miles) of Ukrainian territory in June, compared with 507 sq km in May, 379 sq km in April, and 240 sq km in March, according to ISW data. While gains have increased, it would still take 70 years for Russia to take the whole country if advances continued at the same rate.
The desire to seize more territory beyond the annexed regions may not come as a surprise to Ukrainian negotiators.
During peace talks in Istanbul in May, Russian officials reportedly warned Ukraine that Moscow could sustain its war effort for another 21 years.
Vladimir Medinsky, a Kremlin aide who led the Russian delegation, said Moscow wanted peace but would fight 'however long it takes' and threatened to annexe Sumy and Kharkiv if Ukraine refused to bow down to Putin's demands.
Some US officials also appear to recognise that Russia has little interest in ending the conflict.
Keith Kellogg, Mr Trump's special envoy for Russia and Ukraine, said Russia was to blame for derailing the talks.
'Russian claims that it is the US and Ukraine stalling peace talks are unfounded. President Trump has been consistent and adamant about making progress to end the war,' he said.
'We urge an immediate ceasefire and a move to trilateral talks to end the war. Russia cannot continue to stall for time while it bombs civilian targets in Ukraine.'