Putin calls Ukraine 'anti-Russian enclave' that is to be eliminated

Ukraine is an "anti-Russian enclave," the elimination of which is one of the aims of the war Russia launched more than six months ago, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"That is why our people are fighting there," Putin told schoolchildren in Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, according to The Interfax news agency. "We are protecting both the residents of the Donbass and Russia itself."

An enclave is a foreign territory enclosed by another territory. With this formulation, the Kremlin leader implied a principled claim of ownership over the whole of neighbouring Ukraine. At the very least, he was denying Ukraine's sovereignty of part of its territory.

The official Russian goal so far is the alleged "liberation" of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions from Ukrainian nationalists. International observers, however, see this as a pretext - all the more so since Russia has also occupied large parts of other Ukrainian lands.