Five months into its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine, the Russian government finally came clean: It wants regime change. "We are determined to help the people of eastern Ukraine to liberate themselves from the burden of this absolutely unacceptable regime," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Sunday, draping conquest in the garb of freedom.
This is a new line from Moscow, in fact a reversal of its rhetoric earlier in the war. In March, for example, a representative of Lavrov's department conceded that the Kremlin wanted to keep Ukraine from joining NATO but denied any designs on Kyiv. Moscow's plans "do not include either the occupation of Ukraine or the destruction of its statehood," she said, "nor the overthrow of the current government" led by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
