The Russian occupation governor of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region claimed it had been entirely conquered on Tuesday, making it the first of the four eastern Ukrainian regions Russia has annexed that it fully controls.

“Just a couple of days ago, I received a report that the territory of the Luhansk People’s Republic has been 100 percent liberated,” Leonid Pasechnik told Russia’s TV Channel One.

Not everyone agreed.

Russian military reporters said two villages remained free, and pointed out that Luhansk had been declared conquered once before, in 2022, before being partially reclaimed in a Ukrainian counteroffensive in September of that year.

Undoubtedly, though, Russian forces have inched towards reconquering the entire territory in the intervening 33 months, and that constitutes a second milestone within the past month on Ukraine’s eastern front.

Russia’s advance dealt another blow to Ukraine, more than three years after the full-scale invasion began. On the same day as Pasechnik’s announcement, the United States said it would not be sending Kyiv some weapons that had been promised by the administration of Joe Biden, the former US president.

“This decision was made to put America’s interests first following a review of our nation’s military support and assistance to other countries across the globe,” said the White House.

Russian troops reached the border of the Dnipropetrovsk region over the weekend of June 7-8, marking the first time in the war they had conquered the entire breadth of the Donetsk region at any point, even though about a third of it remains in Kyiv’s hands.

These milestones may be strategically meaningless, as they do not mark a breakthrough or a pace change in the Russian forces’ crawling advance, but they demonstrate that Ukrainian forces are also unable to turn the tide.

The Russian Ministry of Defence claimed its forces had taken the villages of Zaporizhzhia, Perebudova, Shevchenko and Yalta in Donetsk on June 27, proceeding to Chervona Zirka the following day and Novoukrainka on Sunday.

Through such small but constant conquests, Russia has given its offensive in Ukraine an inexorable feeling.

The buffer bluff

“Naturally, the Russian armed forces are now tasked to continue operations to establish a buffer zone. According to experts, it should stretch at least 70 to 120 kilometres (40 to 75 miles) deep inside Ukraine,” Igor Korotchenko, the editor of National Defense magazine, told TASS.

Such statements have come before from Russian officials and pro-Moscow pundits.

Last March, when Russian forces recaptured Kursk, a Russian region Ukraine had counter-invaded, battalion deputy commander Oleg Ivanov told TASS it was now necessary to create a buffer zone “no less than 20km [12 miles] wide, and preferably 30km [19 miles], extending deep into Ukrainian territory,” so that residents of Kursk would be safe from Ukrainian counterattack.

In May, deputy chairman of Russia’s National Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said that “if military aid to the regime of bandits continues”, referring to Kyiv, “the buffer zone could look like this” – and he posted a map on his Telegram channel, showing almost all of Ukraine shaded.

When Russian troops reached the Dnipropetrovsk border last month, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said they had begun new offensive operations in that region “within the framework of the creation of a buffer zone”.

Officially, the Kremlin has annexed only Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, but given that Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 20 revealed he still regarded all of Ukraine as Russian territory, many experts believe these buffer zones are little more than an excuse to continue capturing as much Ukrainian territory as possible.

On June 27, Putin referred to his goals more cryptically, telling journalists at the Eurasian Economic Union summit in Minsk that “we want to conclude the special military operation with the result that we need”.

In May, he called for a buffer zone between Russia and Ukraine on Ukrainian territory, leaving it to his lieutenants to define it. One general thought it should comprise six Ukrainian territories, and legislators in the Russian Duma backed him.

On Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty banning antipersonnel landmines.

The move would allow Ukraine to manufacture, stockpile and use such mines to defend itself.

“Antipersonnel mines … very often have no alternative as a tool for defence,” Zelenskyy said.

Ukraine strikes back

Ukraine continued to score tactical successes of its own inside Russia, using long-range weapons.

On Friday and Saturday, June 27-28, Ukrainian drones struck the Kirovske airfield. The Ukrainian State Security Service (SBU) said it was behind the attack and claimed to have destroyed at least three attack helicopters.

Also last week, Ukraine’s General Staff said an aerial attack had destroyed at least four Sukhoi-34 fighters at Russia’s Marinovka airbase. Russia uses the fighters to drop glide bombs on the Ukrainian front lines.

Intelligence sources reported that Ukraine may have destroyed a Russian intelligence base in the Bryansk region on June 26.

“Russia is investing in its unmanned capabilities. Russia is planning to increase the number of drones used in strikes against our state,” Zelenskyy said on June 30.

The previous day, Russia had conducted the largest unmanned air strike of the war so far, sending 447 drones and 90 missiles into Ukrainian cities.

Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down or electronically suppressed all but one of the drones and 38 missiles.

The increase in scale and intensity of Russian unmanned air attacks this year, and particularly since bilateral talks between the warring sides resumed in May, have led Ukrainian military experts to conclude that Moscow is marking Ukrainian territory it intends to launch a ground war against.

“We are not talking about the front lines. We are talking actually about [rear] areas and even the residential areas of Ukraine, so not so-called red line cities or communities but actually yellow cities and communities, which means slightly farther from the red line zones,” Cambridge University Centre for Geopolitics expert Victoria Vdovychenko told Al Jazeera.

When Zelenskyy spoke on Monday, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul visited Kyiv for the first time.

Zelenskyy said most of the nine billion euros ($11bn) in military aid Germany has promised this year would go towards the “strategic objective” of launching “systematic production of air defence systems”.

He had elaborated on what that meant last week, when he said he was “scaling up Ukraine’s potential, particularly regarding interceptors”, the missiles used to target incoming missiles.

“The scale of our production and the pace of drone development must be fully aligned with the conditions of the war,” he said. Russian attacks have been increasing in scale, and Zelenskyy meant that Ukraine had to keep up in its defensive response.

Regarding drones, he said on Monday, “The priority is drones, interceptor drones and long-range strike drones.”