Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for seizing additional territory from Ukraine signals his long-term desire to subjugate other Central and Eastern European countries, including current members of NATO, according to U.S. and European officials.

“The reasoning that Putin has presented, when he published his demands to NATO and to the United States earlier this year, this reasoning is signaling that his ambition goes way beyond Ukraine,” Germany’s Reinhard Bütikofer, a senior member of the European Parliament, told the Washington Examiner. “His ambition includes the zeal to establish security dominance of Russia over all of the countries that used to belong to the Soviet bloc.”