A Bulgarian delegation with representatives of the four parties in the ruling coalition is leaving for Kiev in the coming days, Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said.

The idea is that in this way the coalition partners could align their position on whether Bulgaria should send military aid to Ukraine. The news comes a day after in Sofia Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba raised this issue sharply, causing serious turmoil in the coalition. "For me, military aid is absolutely the right thing to do, but I am the prime minister, I have coalition patners with clear red lines," Kiril Petkov said.

• Dmytro Kuleba to Bulgarian MPs: not sending military aid to Ukraine is support for Russian aggression

The goal of Moscow’s invasion is to take "full control" of southern Ukraine as well as the eastern Donbas region, to establish a land corridor connecting Russia to Crimea peninsula, and open a route to Moldova's Trans-Dniester region, said deputy commander of Russia's Central Military District, Rustam Minekaev.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has denounced Russian plans as "imperialism". "They stopped hiding it," the 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," the statement read.

In an address to Ukrainian citizens, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the Russian leadership plans to create a "Kherson People's Republic" on the model of the separatist formations in Donetsk and Luhansk and then annex it, as it did with Crimea.

"None of these moves will help Russia, they can only postpone the inevitable, when the invaders will have to leave our land, including Mariupol, the city where resistance continues despite everything the occupiers claim," Vladimir Zelensky said.