Oh my fucking god, the absolute all-time favorite thing for liberals to do in this war is to give Putin goals that at no point he expressed, and then say that he failed to complete them. It's really painful copium to watch as NATO's famed military equipment is ground into scrap metal at alarming speeds. Genuinely gives me second hand embarrassment for them at this point.

So fucking many headlines and opinion pieces and comments smugly saying "Putin planned to take Kiev in a week, the whole of Ukraine in a month, and then move on to the rest of Eastern Europe after that. His disastrous miscalculation is evidence that he is an utterly incompetent military leader." It really betrays their embarrassing lack of knowledge of anything military, because completing these goals isn't even remotely possible anyway. If Putin conquered an area the size of Ukraine in a month then he would be, bar none, the greatest military leader of all time.

When you ask where he stated these goals, they usually say something like "It's obvious that this was his plan, the goals he gave at the outset are just cover for them," if they even know about Putin's speech at all. Given how talented these people are at reading Putin's mind, you'd have thought that maybe they could use this power to discover the make-up of Russia's military and current defenses. The two months of "probing attacks" would have been entirely unnecessary if you'd have just gotten these experts on the case!

What it all ends up doing is creating a set of talismanic phrases for liberals to repeat themselves, as if they were warding spells against the coming evil darkness. "Russia's failed in Ukraine and strengthened NATO! Russia's failed in Ukraine and strengthened NATO! The power of Christ compels you! Russia's failed in Ukraine and strengthened NATO!" Are these statements actually verified, beyond articles by failson journalists in the Washington Post? Has anybody done the actual math as to whether discrediting the Patriot system as a functional air defense system, the Leopards as good, Western drones as good, and soon F-16s, is worth getting Sweden and potentially Finland in to NATO, both countries that already had extensive military ties with America? Has the long-term damage to NATO's reputation as having a colossal and effective military and the draining of ammunition warehouses really worth it? Silly leftist, we don't need to inspect those things! Now, get in the sorcerer circle and chant with us: "We've defeated Russia with only 3% of our military costs! We've defeated Russia with only 3% of our military costs! Patriots can shoot down hypersonic missiles, despite being significantly slower than them, through the power of Western superiority! Patriots can shoot down hypersonic missiles, despite being significantly slower than them, through the power of Western superiority!"

"Oh, I bet we're making that Putler so mad! Is any of it true? It doesn't matter, what matters is the reality that we have collectively invented, because our family members aren't the ones dying en masse, only those disposable Ukrainians!"

This article by Responsible Statecraft (Western source, anti-Russia, they literally advocate for sending more weapons to Ukraine in the article, not Putler Kremlin propaganda disinformation) says it best:

No matter how the war ends, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has created the very outcome he most wanted to prevent: a thriving anti-Russian, pro-Western democracy, armed to the teeth with American weaponry, destined at a minimum to become a de facto ally of Washington, if not an official member of the NATO alliance.

Or so it is thought in Washington and other Western capitals. But, with the sole exception of Ukraine’s deepening and quite understandable revulsion toward Russia, it is much closer to wishful thinking than to reality.

...

In stating publicly that Ukraine will become a NATO member, but only after the war is concluded, the Biden administration has perversely incentivized Russia to make sure the war does not end, at least not officially. The Kremlin need not wage the war at current levels of intensity to achieve that goal. The mere threat that a wave of Russian missile strikes might destroy a new housing project or a recently rebuilt bridge will discourage investors from providing the hundreds of billions of dollars that Ukraine needs for reconstruction.