Moscow aims to capture southern Ukraine: Russian general

A Russian general said on Friday that Moscow wants to seize all of southern and eastern Ukraine, far wider war aims than it had acknowledged as it presses on with a new offensive after its campaign to capture the capital Kyiv collapsed last month.  

Rustam Minnekayev, deputy commander of Russia’s central military district, was quoted by Russian state news agencies as saying Moscow aimed to seize the entire eastern Donbas region, link up with the Crimea peninsula, and capture Ukraine’s entire south as far as a breakaway, Russian-occupied region of Moldova.  

Ukraine said his comments had given the lie to Russia’s previous assertions that it has no territorial ambitions.  
“They stopped hiding it,” Ukraine’s defence ministry said on Twitter. Russia had “acknowledged that the goal of the ‘second phase’ of the war is not victory over the mythical Nazis, but simply the occupation of eastern and southern Ukraine. Imperialism as it is.”   In Geneva, the United Nations human rights office said there was growing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, including indiscriminate shelling and summary executions. It said Ukraine also appeared to have used weapons with indiscriminate effects.  Russia said on Thursday it had won the war’s biggest fight - the battle for the main port of the Donbas, Mariupol - after a nearly two-month siege. President Vladimir Putin said he had decided not to try to root out thousands of Ukrainian troops still holed up in a huge steel works there, but to barricade them inside instead.  
KYIV/MARIUPOL, April 
22 (Reuters)