Vladimir Putin’s mad dash for Kyiv shown in leaked Ukraine battle plan The Sunday Times reveals

The Sunday Times has published details of Russia's plans for capturing Ukraine's capital Kyiv in the early days of the ongoing war. Caliber.Az reprints the article:

Vladimir Putin was so confident that his army would sweep across Ukraine without serious resistance that his forces were ordered to be on the outskirts of Kyiv only 13 hours after the start of Russia’s invasion.

Airborne troops who poured into northern Ukraine from Belarus on February 24 were told to depart at 1:33 am and be on the edge of Kyiv, 140 miles away, at 2:55 pm the same day, according to detailed invasion plans obtained by The New York Times.

A unit of the 26th Tank Regiment was also expected to cross the border with Ukraine and fight its way to a point across the Dnipro river 250 miles away within 24 hours, the plans show. “There are no forces or equipment for reinforcements,” the orders read.

Instead, the Russian army was quickly bogged down, and its lumbering columns of tanks and armoured vehicles were easy targets for the smaller but far nimbler Ukrainian defenders.

An armoured column of more than 30,000 troops ordered to advance on the city of Chernihiv, 90 miles from Kyiv, was eviscerated by forces armed with shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons such as American Javelins.

“In the first battle the column was ambushed and I was wounded,” one Russian soldier said. “For 24 hours I was missing a leg, lying in a field waiting for my unit to come to get me.”

As the invasion faltered Ukraine began targeting generals who were forced to visit the frontlines to ensure that their orders were carried out. In April General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, made a secret visit himself. Ukraine found out and began planning an attack. Washington, which was worried that Gerasimov’s assassination would trigger an escalation in the war, asked Kyiv to call it off.

“We told them not to do it,” a senior American official said. “We were like, ‘Hey, that’s too much.’ ” The warning came too late: Ukraine had already launched its attack. Gerasimov escaped but dozens of Russians were killed.

“We targeted Gerasimov, and hit the headquarters. Lots of senior officers died but he managed to get away a bit earlier. We weren’t in time,” Oleksiy Arestovich, a presidential adviser, said.
Moscow said that Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, had also visited troops near the frontline. It did not say where.

Putin, 70, had spent almost two years in near-total isolation at his residence near Moscow during the pandemic. Much of his time, it appears, was used obsessing about Ukraine and his own legacy. He apparently had not even considered the idea that his badly equipped and ill-prepared army’s effort to seize Kyiv would run into trouble. Troops were issued with victory parade uniforms and enough rations for several days, Ukrainian officials said.

Russia also deployed national guard officers in ordinary police lorries on the assumption that they would be needed to control crowds in Kyiv after the city had been captured. “Our guys couldn’t believe it. They just picked them off as they were driving towards Kyiv. This is when we realised the Russians might not be so hard to beat after all,” a source close to the Ukrainian military said.

With the Kremlin anticipating a speedy victory, Russian state media was told to prepare triumphant articles in advance. One of them, entitled The New World Order, was published by mistake by the RIA Novosti state news agency on the third day of the war. “Ukraine has returned to Russia,” it read. “Western global domination can be considered complete and finally over.” It was quickly removed from the website.

Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed and hundreds of thousands of people have fled Ukraine since the start of the war. Public support for the invasion has also begun to crumble. Just one in four Russians now wants their army to remain in Ukraine, according to a leaked Kremlin poll. Despite the setbacks, Ukrainian officials say that Putin could be planning a new attempt to capture Kyiv that could begin next month.

Politicians loyal to the Kremlin are keen to demonstrate their pro-war stances. Denis Maidanov, a rock singer and MP with Putin’s ruling party, has released a slick music video hailing the might of Russia’s Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles. The lyrics to the song, which is called Sarmatushka, were written by Dmitry Rogozin, the former head of Roscosmos, the national space agency. “From Mother Russia, the Sarmats stare into the distance at the United States,” Maidanov sings.

The video was released as Russian investigators said that a prominent state media presenter who called for Ukrainian children to be drowned or burnt alive would not face charges. Anton Krasovsky, a presenter with RT, the Kremlin-backed media outlet, caused an outcry when he made the comments during a programme in October. Ukraine accused him of inciting genocide and called for a worldwide ban on RT. Investigators in Moscow said that he had committed no crime.