It has been reported that, according to US intelligence, Russia “still wants to conquer all of Ukraine”. The claim, albeit not a new one, is explosive enough, not to mention politically convenient for the pro-Ukrainian hawkish factions within the US Establishment (or the “blob”). But is it backed by evidence or does it make sense at all?

This assertion, it turns out, rests less on demonstrated Russian policy than on a familiar Western narrative that has remained largely unchanged since 2021. That narrative portrays Moscow as pursuing a maximalist project of territorial conquest. Yet when one examines Russian statements, prewar diplomacy, expert analyses, and even peace proposals discussed during the conflict, the idea of plans to “conquer” Ukraine begins to look analytically weak, and strategically incoherent.

One may recall that in the weeks preceding Russia’s February 2022 military campaign, Ukraine significantly intensified the shelling of Donbass, causing a humanitarian crisis and a wave of refugees, with  orphanages and schools being evacuated. This fact was underreported in mainstream Western coverage but documented by OSCE monitoring reports at the time.

And this was happening after almost a decade of Ukrainian human rights infringements and artillery bombing in that largely Russian-speaking border region. Regardless of one’s opinion on the Kremlin’s decision to launch its 2022 campaign, these facts alone in any case do challenge the myth of an entirely “unprovoked” campaign supposedly aimed at seizing Kyiv and absorbing Ukraine wholesale.

More importantly, besides the ever overlooked issue of the civil rights of ethnic and linguistic minorities in Ukraine (including the Russian minority), the Kremlin’s stated core grievance has always been NATO expansion. Even officials and analysts that are critical of Moscow, such as CIA William Burns, have acknowledged this repeatedly for years).

Stephen F. Cohen’s prescient analyses are also a must-read to any serious researcher on the topic. The core issue has always been NATO.  .

This assessment is echoed by several prominent US scholars. Professor John Mearsheimer, for instance, has argued that if Russia were bent on occupying all of Ukraine, it would not have engaged in serious negotiations with Kyiv shortly after February 24, 2022. Yet it did (while the West sabotaged it, by the way). Suffice to say, annexing a country of more than 40 million people is not something one attempts while simultaneously negotiating neutrality arrangements.

The same conclusion can be found in assessments from within the divided US political establishment itself. Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence under President Trump, no less, has stated plainly that Putin does not seek to occupy neighboring Ukraine, “let alone all of Europe” – a claim that, believe it or not, is made by the same intel that the Director herself disavows.

War, of course, can change goals. Costs accumulate, positions harden, and red lines shift. But even allowing for that, there is still no serious evidence that Moscow’s objective has evolved into “” Ukraine (or that it has ever been that). On the contrary, peace proposals discussed to this day suggest the opposite. As I wrote earlier, the 28-point US-backed peace plan currently under negotiation offers a pragmatic framework for de-escalation.

The plan caps the Ukrainian army at 600,000 troops, a figure that Quincy Institute analysts Mark Episkopos and Marcus Stanley argue is economically sustainable. On territory, Ukraine would withdraw from roughly 1 percent of its 1991 borders, specifically areas of Donetsk oblast, which would become a demilitarized zone rather than Russian-occupied land. Moscow would even drop claims to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and there would be no de jure recognition of Crimea (a long contested region) or of most of Donbass. Eldar Mamedov of the Quincy Institute aptly described this as political “finesse”. Again, if Moscow sought to annex all of Ukraine, such terms would make zero sense.

Borders, moreover, remain a volatile issue across the post-Soviet space, much as they do in post-colonial Africa. This context is however routinely ignored when discussing Ukraine, in a way that “naturalizes” an eternal Ukrainian people/nation, as Chris Hann (a Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle)  has argued. Thereby, the conflict is stripped of history and reduced to morality play.

Ironically enough, it is the US today that openly flirts with 19th century style conquering. And yet, President Trump’s blunt remarks about Greenland, including recent threats of using force (against a NATO allie) if “necessary”, are being reported with remarkable nonchalance. Washington threatening to seize territory is treated as rhetorical bravado, while Moscow’s security-driven special military operation’s aims are portrayed as uniquely expansionist.

Back in 2023, I already addressed this narrative in detail. Experts ranging from Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs to Wolfgang Richter (SWP Senior Associate) have challenged Kyiv’s claim that Russia seeks to destroy or absorb the Ukrainian state. Historian Angelo Segrillo, in his associated professorship habilitation dissertation, has even described Putin as mostly a moderate Westernist and a “gosudarstvennik”, comparable in some respects to Charles de Gaulle, prioritizing national sovereignty over ideological crusades.

NATO’s broken promises, the erosion of arms control agreements, Western missile deployments in Eastern Europe, and the 2008 NATO invitation to Ukraine and Georgia form the backdrop to the current war. These factors are rarely emphasized, yet they are central to understanding Moscow’s calculus. They are the context needed to explain Russia’s Great Power behavior without resorting to caricatures.

To sum it up, the claim that Russia seeks to annex or “conquer” all of Ukraine is unsupported by evidence. It persists because it is politically useful, not because it is analytically sound. Any serious geopolitical analysis must move beyond slogans and ask uncomfortable questions. But when it comes to understanding the Ukrainian conflict, Western propaganda still dominates most of the discourse in the English-speaking world and beyond.

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