It was in the dead of winter when Moscow airdropped several hundred paratroopers into the neighbouring country’s main airfield with orders to capture the capital, kill the president and install a client regime. As tanks also crossed the border, the Kremlin expected the country would quickly fall.
That was Moscow’s plan — for the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Four decades later, Russian president Vladimir Putin used the same overconfident blueprint for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, where he similarly imagined a swift capture of Kyiv followed by national capitulation.
