Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is its largest and most consequential commitment of military forces abroad in decades. The stakes for Russia are extremely high.
In this report, the authors analyze Russia’s official public narrative regarding its war aims in Ukraine in the first year of the full-scale invasion. They generate expectations about how Russia would have been expected to engage in objective-setting based on military science and recent practice, and they then document the reality of Moscow’s behavior through a qualitative analysis of Russian leaders’ key speeches and a quantitative study of an original dataset of official statements.
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