We've had two years of reporting and analysis now and it's clear the Russian plan was for a fast and brief military/intelligence operation that decapitates and paralyzes the Ukrainian government and installs as a friendly regime. One particularly telling aspect (which was not as obvious in the chaos of the early days of invasion) is the substantial preparation and rapid deployment of civil administration resources into occupied territories - down to delivering Russian school textbooks. It's not particularly material what Russians claimed before they invaded, they planned to begin ruling Ukraine very quickly.
To me it seems most clear that Russia expected a negotiated settlement to happen shortly after hostilities began, largely to the point that their army was more for show than for actual use. And they would have been right had we not decided to escalate things to the international scale bloody and brutal conflict that it became.
The claims they actually expected to win an actual hot war in a few weeks are not very logical in my opinion. Ukraine is a nation with extensively highly fortified locations and they had large numbers of highly motivated, and well armed, fighters in nationalist battalions that would be 100% guaranteed to fight. And in a war where somebody is fighting back, you simply don't win in a few weeks - ever. Look to Gaza - that's basically a no holds barred war where they're just completely flattening everything with the latest Western arms, all to try to take out a group of 20-25k of people running around in t-shirts with RPGs. And that's likely to go on for years.
The USSR (as well as the USA) lost a war to Afghanistan, Russia lost a war to Chechnya, and more - all because of this phenomena. War without surrender against somebody who's fighting back is brutal, regardless of their inferiority on paper.
This is all very fine in theory but in the case of the re-invasion of Ukraine, we have, as I mentioned, plenty of evidence and 2 years worth of analysis. We don't have to think about this from first principles or parallels to other wars, we know what actually took place in Ukraine - from the operation in Hostomel airport, the effective and ineffective activated Russian agents, the prepared parade uniforms, the near instant deployment of civil administration, the ready 'filtration camps', etc.
And since you mention Afghanistan, the illustrative parallel is really this
Here I'd fundamentally disagree. I think all we have 2 years of completely unprecedented propaganda and "information warfare." Information about what's happening, and has been happening, is only now starting to make the Western news, as the war seems to be headed towards its terminal phase. I think we're only going to have plenty of evidence and meaningful analysis many years from now, starting November 6th, at the earliest. For instance, that Newsweek article merely debunking the claim about Russia claiming Kyiv would fall in 3 days was only published in October 2023 - more than 1.5 years after the war began, when that claim was being widely spread by our media!
I'm not entirely sure the point about Afghanistan goes against what I'm saying. Yes, the USSR destroyed the government, and highly motivated fighters continued to fight, and ultimately defeat, them. The exact same thing happened to us. That's, more or less, the point I am making. Russia knew extremely well there were relatively large numbers of heavily armed, trained, and motivated nationalist types in Ukraine. The only way they were winning quickly is if they could negotiate a settlement with the civilian government.
I'm not sure what the propaganda thing is about, we have strong evidence the Russian plan was for a rapid takeover, subversion/replacement of local elites, imposition of their administrative structures. This also makes plenty of sense as it was a key type of Soviet military and political operation and one in which they had plenty of balefully successful practice.
Afghanistan is an example of the successful execution of the initial military engagement of such an operation, the rest was unsuccessful but Ukraine is not Afghanistan - it's right next door, it has deep historic, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, you-name-it ties to Russia. It does have also have a long history of armed nationalist resistance. The Soviet Union successfully suppressed it at least twice and it's reasonable suspect that Russia would have been able to do so as well, especially given their methods. Each Soviet effort was followed by campaigns of direct and indirect forced Russification and much worse. It's worth asking yourself why, say, Crimea is full of Russian speakers. It's not because it's some historical cradle of Russianness.
During the Iraq War would you have ever imagined that the 'mobile chemical weapons laboratories', verified by 87 (or however many it was) different intelligence agencies, were actually just completely generic helium stations for weather balloons? That the 'high level insider in the Iraq government' was actually a taxi driver and thief with absolutely no connection whatsoever to the Iraq government? That the 'rock solid evidence of Saddam attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger' was actually just a poorly forged receipt? Literally all of the evidence we used to justify the invasion was fake, the exact same evidence that we had people like Colin Powell testify to the authenticity to, under oath.
So "we" don't have anything except claims from an active participant in a war who has been caught lying repeatedly during this war, who has a long history of lying prior, and who has every motivation to continue lying in this one. What's actually happened for the past couple of years will only become clear over the years to come.
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As for Crimea, it has a pretty wild history, but it's never been majority/plurality Ukrainian or even close to it. You can see a demographic history here. [1] At the start of the USSR it was designated a subregion of Russia, but was primarily populated by Tatars. Over the years leading up to WW2 many more Russians migrated to it, and relatively small number of Ukrainians. After WW2 the Tatars were accused of collaborating with the Nazis and deported from the region leaving it almost entirely Russian, which remained the case til the current era.
It was only in 1954 that Nikita Khrushchev granted it to Ukraine, ostensibly as a gift to Ukraine celebrating the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's integration into Russia. In reality it was part of a political power struggle of the time, and in the Russian world this is often referred to as Khrushchev's Folly, probably mimicking Seward's Folly. In spite it being a sub-region nominally under Ukraine, it remained populated primarily with ethnic Russians. And this never changed. The highest percent of Ukrainians was 26% in 1970, at which time there were also 67.3% ethnic Russians.
> The claims they actually expected to win an actual hot war in a few weeks
They were not expecting an actual hot war (hence the "Special Military Operation"). I think that the plan was to quickly capture and/or replace the government, have the country go into chaos, have good "patriotic" people already in place to act as with the new government, and then realign the country towards Russia.
Capturing Kyiv or at least forcing the government abroad was a big part of that.
But even assuming I was wrong, the main point remains: I think it is clear that they were not expecting a years-long hot war with a neighbor, and that is a massive failure intelligence-wise
