Ukraine Accuses Russia of Digging Mass Graves for Civilian Victims
KHARKIV, Ukraine—Ukrainian officials accused Russia of burying thousands of civilians in mass graves outside Mariupol, a city now mostly under Russian control, as a senior Russian military official said Moscow’s territorial goals extend well beyond the country’s eastern Donbas region.
Moscow stopped short of considering Donbas as part of Ukraine when President Vladimir Putin in February recognized the independence of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics, statelets created with Moscow’s help in 2014.
Maj. Gen. Rustam Minnekayev, deputy commander of Russia’s Central Military District, said in remarks at a conference carried by state media on Friday that Moscow sought to control all of southern Ukraine to secure a land corridor to Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014, and to Moldova’s Transnistria region, where he said Russian speakers suffer from discrimination.
To achieve these goals, Russia, in addition to capturing the parts of Donbas that remain under Ukrainian control, would also have to seize the coastal regions of Mykolaiv and Odessa. Russian forces came close to overrunning Mykolaiv in early March, but have since been repelled and control only a sliver of the region. Moscow, however, occupies most of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine and a large part of the Zaporizhzhia region.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-advances-in-ukraine-s-donbas-is-accused-of-digging-mass-graves/ar-AAWu0UM