Debunking the Myth of Russia’s 3 Day Victory in Ukraine
Russia Truth, 10/1/25
The idea that Russia would defeat Ukraine in only three days—the so-called “three-day SMO”—has become a pervasive meme associated with the war. It’s a widespread misconception, but its origin is not in an official Russian statement.
To understand where this notion came from, we can look back to 2014, when an article reported Vladimir Putin boasting he could take Kyiv in two weeks. Considering the poor state of the Ukrainian army then, with mass defections in Crimea and struggles against separatist militias, this claim was perhaps plausible at the time.
The Russian Media and Cyber War Angle
The story picked up again in April 2021 when RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, stated in an interview that Russia would defeat Ukraine in two days in the event of a “hot war.” Crucially, she said this in the context of a cyber war that would target infrastructure, causing city blackouts and cutting gas supplies, not a conventional ground war. She even expressed skepticism about a conventional war being possible in the modern world.
Western Intelligence and Historical Precedents
When the February 2022 invasion began, many Western officials genuinely expected a swift conclusion. This expectation was informed by the quickness of previous Russian actions, such as the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the 2008 invasion of Georgia, where the bulk of the fighting lasted only about five days.
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Report
A specific source for the “72 hours” claim appears on the Ukrainian version of the Wikipedia page for the Battle of Kyiv. It cited the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which allegedly stated that Russian forces intended to capture and blockade Kyiv within 72 hours. Notably, this refers to blockading Kyiv, not invading the entire country.
However, a closer look at the RUSI report, “Preliminary Lessons in Conventional War Fighting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine February to July 2022,” presents a different timeline, stating that Russia planned to invade Ukraine over a 10-day period and occupy the country to enable annexation by August 2022. The report based much of its information on captured Russian documents, but stated the underlying source material could not be made public, which raises a significant red flag. Furthermore, those alleged documents from the 810th Russian Naval Infantry Brigade reportedly gave a 15-day timeline for seizing objectives like Melitopol, which was actually captured faster than that supposed expectation. Nowhere in these documents is a 72-hour national takeover mentioned.
The True Origin: US Officials
The reality is that the myth primarily originated from US sources. As Russia’s military buildup became undeniable in early 2022, on February 5, 2022, Fox News reported on a closed-door briefing where General Mark Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, allegedly told US lawmakers that a full-scale Russian invasion could result in the fall of Kyiv within 72 hours. He also predicted substantial casualties. Even Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko repeated a similar three-to-four-day timeframe for an entire war.
On the day of the invasion, February 24, 2022, Newsweek cited three US officials who expected Kyiv to fall within 96 hours and the Ukrainian leadership to follow in about a week. This is where the myth of the “3-day SMO” was born.
Newsweek itself later admitted that the story provided “ammunition for a decisively misleading meme” and that virtually no prominent Kremlin pundits were predicting the three-day fall. Reddit users have also admitted that the story was a simplification used to ridicule the expectation of a swift Russian victory. While Russia’s high command was almost certainly expecting a rapid victory to force negotiations and concessions, the specific three-day claim was not a Russian one; it was a foreign one that has been widely popularized as a meme.
