Captured Russian documents reveal plan to subjugate Ukraine in 10 days and kill population

Captured Russian documents recently leaked by a British defense and security firm have revealed Vladimir Putin’s plan to seize Ukraine within ten days and kill the country’s leadership, and their plan for Ukraine's civilians was horrifying. 

In a plan that was apparently signed off by Putin, Russia's Ministry of Defense planned to start its invasion of Ukraine with a “massive missile and airstrike campaign” that was designed to knock out key Ukrainian military targets.

Russian security services were also instructed to kill key Ukrainian political leaders, including Volodymyr Zelensky, according to the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI). 

The documents also revealed that Moscow did not plan to attack Ukraine’s critical rail and power infrastructure as it was necessary for their occupation plans.

The leaked files also outlined Russian plans to capture Ukraine’s nuclear power plants and use them as a shelter for their troops. 

In the initial stages of the invasion, Ukraine believed Russia had planned to use its Belarussian airborne units to capture the key nuclear power plants of Rivne and Khmelnytskyi. 

A report on the documents from RUSI noted Russia had the plan to blackmail other European nations with the threat of radiation poisoning if they challenged the invasion of Ukraine.

“Ukraine’s nuclear power plants served three purposes therefore in the invasion plan,” the authors of RUSI’s report wrote, Ukraine's nuclear power plants would, “function as reliable shelters for Russia’s troops and military personnel, equipment, command posts and ammunition depots.”

Moreover, Ukrainian power plants would be used to “gain control over Ukraine’s energy system… and to provide the option to obtain leverage for blackmailing European countries with the risk of radiation pollution as a result of possible accidents at nuclear power plants if they attempted to intervene,” the report continued. 

Most Russian officals were not aware of the planned invasion until days before the invasion began. But those who were aware assumed Kiyv would fall quickly. 

Russian officials who did know about the plan allegedly assumed Ukrainian government officials would "either flee or be captured as a result of the speed of the invasion", the RUSI report noted. 

The most worrying details of the captured documents revealed Russia’s plan to quickly subjugate and divide the Ukrainian population to neutralize any organized resistance. 

“Officials planned to register the entire population by going door to door, noting if they should be eliminated or whether they were likely to collaborate,” wrote Verity Bown of the Telegraph. 

Ukraine citizens were to be divided into four categories according to Bowman, “Those who should be killed; those in need of suppression and intimidation; those considered neutral who should be encouraged to collaborate and those prepared to collaborate.”

People would be processed through several filtering camps and Russian authorities intended to coerce the cooperation of local and regional authorities to handle most of the dirty work of sorting Ukraine’s population. 

The end goal of the plan was to “re-educate” the Ukrainian population by importing teachers and officials from Russia, something we already saw in Ukraine’s captured Kharkiz and Kherson regions after their liberation.