Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Moscow's military "tasks" in Ukraine now went beyond the eastern Donbas region, acknowledging that peace talks with Ukraine back in March failed to produce any breakthrough.

Lavrov also said that resuming peace talks with Kyiv doesn't make sense at the moment in an interview with state news agency RIA Novosti.

At that time, he said, the focus was on the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR), self-styled breakaway entities in eastern Ukraine from which Russia has said it aims to drive out Ukrainian government forces.

"Now the geography is different, it's far from being just the DPR and LPR, it's also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories," he said, referring to territories well beyond the Donbas that Russian forces have wholly or partly seized.

"This process is continuing logically and persistently," he said, adding that Russia might need to push even deeper.

If the West, out of "impotent rage" or desire to aggravate the situation further, kept pumping Ukraine with long-range weapons such as the U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), "that means the geographical tasks will extend still further from the current line," Lavrov said.

After being beaten back in an initial attempt to take the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Russia's defense ministry said in late March that the first phase of its "special military operation" was complete and it would now focus on "achieving the main goal, the liberation of Donbas."

Nearly four months later, it has taken Luhansk, one of two regions that make up the Donbas, but remains far from capturing all of the other, Donetsk. In the past few weeks it has ramped up missile strikes on cities across Ukraine.

(With input from Reuters)

(Cover: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after a bilateral meeting at the G20 Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Bali, Indonesia, July 8, 2022. /Reuters)