KHARKIV, Ukraine—Russian forces slowly advanced in their offensive to encircle eastern Ukraine’s Donbas area, as Ukrainian officials said thousands of people have been buried in mass graves in the city of Mariupol, most of which has been seized by Russian troops after nearly two months of combat.
A senior Russian military official, meanwhile, said Russia’s territorial goals extend well beyond Donbas, which Moscow stopped considering as part of Ukraine when President
Vladimir Putin
in February recognized the independence of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics.
Maj. Gen. Rustam Minnekayev, deputy commander of Russia’s Central Military District, said in remarks carried by state news agency Tass 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.
Ukraine’s second-largest city has been under increased Russian shelling after nearly two months of heavy fighting. WSJ’s Yaroslav Trofimov reports on the dire conditions in Kharkiv as residents survive on little food and shelter in basements. Photo: Felipe Dana/Associated Press
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