There’s not, it was actually General Milley who put this number out there and the media and social media ran with it as if it were an official Kremlin statement.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/gen-milley-says-kyiv-could-fall-w...

and CIA Director Bill Burns https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085155440/cia-director-putin...

TV propagandist Olga Skabeeva claimed two days, so did Margarita Simonyan and many others:

https://twitter.com/ruinwanderer/status/1622142324015878144

as for russian invasion plans, good old potato man leaked them live on national TV https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/moldova-next-belarus-president-ma...

He might be a huge goober but ethnic slurs are still against hn policy.

Whilst I do not have a YouTube link, I do have seen several Russian pundits imply that Ukrainians would capitulate in 3 days, Russia just has to sneeze their way and they'd keel over, etc.

It's a common cliché. General Aleksandr Lebed claimed during Russia's 1991 intervention in Moldova that his tanks would be able to capture Bucharest in just 7 hours.

Not from Putin directly. There were a lot of actions taken by the Russian government which just imply it. High ranking Russian officials that booked reservations for restaurants in Kyiv the week after the invasion, troops taking their dress uniforms instead of food, a pre-scheduled propaganda essay that was accidentally released on the 28th which retained language implying that Kyiv had already been taken and so forth.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/09/russia-putin-propaganda...

I hate talking about downvotes but it is really odd that you're being downvoted for asking for a source. Source are requested all the time on this website, and only in certain cases do they get downvoted like this. Hopefully your comment won't be gray in a few hours when more people participate in the thread.

I would like to see a source as well, because I want to see sources for all claims I encounter online. Why should I trust a random person on a website?

Very strange how anyone asking for sources abt any politically charged issue on social media gets immediately attacked.

No wonder social media starts to circulate the most bonkers things when no one is allowed to question even verifiable statements.

Its not strange at all, you have a ratio of bots mixed in with people, and quite a number of them seem like those broken Chat-GPT narratives you see.

Political warfare is nothing new. Any intelligent person knows, if it doesn't have sources its not credible.

Quite a few sources were provided after all.

There are reports of captured Russian war plans. Im not sure where i read about it but War on the Rocks and Michael Kofman are credible experts.

I dont actually remember the details of the plan but It was something like:

Massive armor convoy sent to Kyiv alongside the rapid capture of Hostomel airport and a then a giant airlift of troops towards a point very much close to Kyiv.

The disdain the commenter is showing for the Russian invasion plan is misplaced however. Most contemporary reports (Post battle of Kyiv) say that the Ukrainians were indeed caught by surprise, that Russian cyberwarfare managed to take out Ukrainian AA allowing for the helicopter Assault at Hostomel and that although Ukraine was sucessful It was a close call and losses were heavy.

Again you have to Dig a bit to avoid the propaganda narratives. The race to Kyiv was actually a Very Very close battle according to what we know now.

The whole 3 days to Kyiv was actually an overstatement. I believe it was more 13 days to capture Kyiv, 2-3 months for the whole country excluding the West which Russia didnt believe It could occupy without heavy resistance. But thats just written out from memory and i might be wrong on the details.

I believe that the Russian expectation was something similar to 2014, where initial Ukrainian resistance just collapsed or was innefective.

Yes, they even posted premature victory piece:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60562240

Link to actual russian piece: https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20...