The phrase “Ukraine will be occupied in 3 days” (or variations of it) has been around for years and depending on which side you watch, it is sometimes attributed to Russia as a threat/promise, sometimes to Western sources as an assessment/fear. Of course, at the end of 2024, when the Russian invasion is approaching the end of its 3rd year, looking for “pre-war” statements is not worth much. But for the historical record (and since the topic keeps coming up), let’s look for the source of that particular wording, which as a prediction has never been verified.
So as the original source and starting point of various variations of the phrase, it has to be the Russian President himself, Vladimir Putin. Who in August 2014 had said in a telephone conversation with the then president of the Commission, Manuel Barroso, that “he can occupy Kiev in two weeks”. The conversation, revealed by Barroso, had taken place during the development of the Ukrainian crisis that year, and the Kremlin had not denied the phrase, but emphasized that it was not made as an “aggressive statement”, but in a different context of discussion.
So it appears that several years before the invasion, Russia already declared to its interlocutors that it has the military ability to subjugate Ukraine in a short period of time, which seemed reasonable, considering the huge difference in military capacity of the 2 countries.
The… transition from “2 weeks” to “a few days”, however, will be seen later and specifically in 2021. Where Russian media, mainly the state television channel “Russia-1” will host such rants: such as that of the editor-in-chief of Russia Today , Margaritas Simonyan (from the most “hard” opinions, within Russia), in April, that “if there is a war, Ukraine will be defeated in 2 days”. That year was when Russia had launched the first threatening military mobilization on the border with Ukraine. Which was then defused, but months later regrouped to culminate in the invasion on February 24 of the following year.
Apparently on the eve of the invasion, the saying “3 days until Kiev falls” has its… honor. In the US, much publicity was given when General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces, made such an assessment to lawmakers, as Fox News reported on February 5. While the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, in an interview on the “Russia-1” channel, will say something similar, that “Ukraine will withstand a possible Russian invasion for 3-4 days at most”. And he drew the prediction even more by saying that if the war extends “by the time the Americans wake up we will have reached the English Channel”!
Then the talk of “a few days” when the invasion starts is now being heard inside Russia by various television and online commentators. Here, of course, the Russian raid on the outskirts of Kiev, which also led to the temporary occupation of the airport in Hostomel in the first days of the invasion, if it had succeeded might have brought about the collapse of the Ukrainian government. But it didn’t happen and we assume that this battle will fuel “what if…” scenarios for many years to come.
Overall, therefore, the formulation that if there is a war with Russia, Ukraine “will fall in a short time”, either weeks or days depending on the version, can be traced back to Putin himself, but it was not something paradoxical. As most analysts had the same feeling, measuring the arsenals of the two countries, the already great prestige of the Russian forces with their impressive past and of course the problematic image of Ukraine itself. Where in 2022 it had rebuilt its armed forces enough from the chaos of 2014 (then if Russia invaded it would have succeeded in no time), but it still paled in front of Russian “size”.
But history showed otherwise. How the Russian conventional force was plagued by bad organization in 2022, with many wrong assumptions in the planning of operations, with poor preparation, even though they had been mobilized months before, with overconfidence and with an inability to understand the opponent. Thus the initial attack failed in its main objective, which was to subdue Ukraine quickly, forcing a change of government and policy, before there was an international reaction. Almost three years later, the war continues, Russia shows great improvement in the field of operations, but when the conflict will end no one can predict. And unfortunately it won’t be in “2-3 days” from today.
