I was feeling masochistic so I browsed 
for a while, and remembered that all pro-Ukraine folks seem to take this as a fact. I remember trying to look into this and not finding any evidence, and angry libs were not exactly forthcoming with sources themselves.
So besides the initial feint towards Kyiv (which AFAIK is circumstantial at best) was there ever any evidence pointing towards some Russian plan to eventually annex the entirety of Ukraine?
No. As usual it’s projection, as the US has in effect annexed Ukraine, first via the Maidan coup, second via the Bretton Woods institutions of imperialism, and third via lend lease and general gutting and privatization of Ukranian society and productive forces since the start of the SMO nearly two years ago.
What I find most absurd about it all is that Russia has been very clear about their security concerns and proposed solutions for the last fifteen years or so, but these public speeches and press releases are completely ignored in the west.
No. And the Kiev operation is not any kind of evidence, not even circumstantial.
However war goals do change over the course of a war and it may well be that this becomes a goal eventually if the West continues to categorically refuse to accept its defeat in Ukraine and tries to keep propping up a Nazi puppet regime in whatever remains of Ukraine when the Russian speaking parts have been liberated. Annexation may become a strategic necessity to ensure Russia’s safety.
There is not. Even with the initial offensive on Kyiv it’s more likely that the objective was a change in Ukraine’s goverment. A new government that would recognize the independence of Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republic and their eventual annexation to Russia, and would guarantee they would not join Nato.
Which is basically what is gonna happen anyway but now with hundreds of thousands of deaths in a pointless war.
There is zero evidence for this. This theorycrafting emerges from the western assumption that Russia is an empire trying to expand. This notion is ridiculous if you consider the post USSR dissolution history.
I asked this same question on lemmy.ml and the closest thing to evidence that I got was in this comment: https://lemmy.ml/comment/6359409
If you go to the comment and read the quote, it is full of hypotheticals and from a literal US military institute. This is the level of brainworms that western propagandists are operating at right now.
This is so strange to me, because if there were any such large scale annexation plans involving their army, I’d expect there’d to be dozens of leaks of such secret intentions. But besides that, it means that basically every vocal Ukraine supporter hasn’t even bothered checking that the most foundational fact of their narrative is even believable. Reddit and 4chan are cut from the same cloth.
There are 2 speeches of Putin before the SMO. He said he won’t occupy the country and it was just to protect Donbass and prevent NATOfication of Ukraine. What he said about historicity of Donbass was that they were historical lands of Russia and was given to Ukraine by Lenin to placate the Ukrainian commies or whatever. In that regard people extrapolate the whole speech to be about destroying Ukraine as a state. It’s not, he is saying as those historical Russian lands given to Ukraine, Ukraine should protect the minority rights and shouldn’t join NATO and become a hostile force. Yes, he is denying Ukraine as a state when Ukraine lived under Tsar but there was no official borders drawn pre 1922 as Ukraine exists today. Crimea was also attached to Ukraine in 1956 , so Ukraine has visibly less rights to Crimea than Russia. That’s all his speech is about.
was given to Ukraine by Lenin to placate the Ukrainian commies or whatever.
Lenin did had proukrainian bias though, even went as far as to tell the Donbas communists who wanted autonomy in 1918 to shut up and fall in line.
Lol really I thought it was just a made up nonsense from Putin 🤣
well they did annex part of ukraine, but that was definitely not the intention at the beginning. Russia did not anticipate how this would turn out at all. Although they quickly turned it in their favor.
And even if they had initially intended for that, that wouldn’t change the issue too much. But the narrative that Ukraine is not loosing the war hinges on taking as a fact the hypothesis of a full annexation being the main war goal. On r/worldnews there was even an article by the Kyiv Post about a “Russian Strategic Defeat” due to them not controlling the whole of Ukraine
yet.Like @cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml said, I also think they might at the very least march into the rest of Ukraine to force capitulation, though I don’t think they’ll seek full annexation as they’ll have even more flanks directly facing into NATO.
