Putin pins all his hopes on Kyiv falling

I don't know whether Putin seriously thought he could invade and overwhelm Ukraine in a matter of days but in the third week of the war there is now little doubt that he is pinning all his hopes on grabbing Kyiv. But then what? Does he put some nonentity into the presidential chair, believing that he can control the whole of Ukraine for ever? That was tried by the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s and it ended in bitter failure. Or does Putin think that with Ukraine under his belt he can march into Moldova and grab another country for his revitalised empire dreams? To contain Ukraine post-war Putin will need a huge army in-country and a military budget that patently he will not be able to afford whatever the price of oil and gas. So venturing further into Moldova would be suicidal both for Putin and for the future of Russia. But Putin has aleady demonstrated that he is not the great strategist he believes he is. He miscalculated pretty well everything in his planning for the invasion of Ukraine. He underestimated Ukraine's powers of resistance, he doubted the US and Europe would mount such a united sanctions regime against him and his cronies, he never took properly into account how western arms deliveries into Ukraine would literally stop his invading forces in their tracks, and he never believed that any country would dare to stop taking oil imports from Russia. The US and Britain are now in the process of doing so. So Putin is trapped in Ukraine. He is never going to get the victory he had hoped for and even if he takes Kyiv he will only do so by launching an artillery bombardment that will destroy the city. It wouldn't even be a hollow victory because it would provoke years of insurgency that would exhaust his army and cripple Russia's already failing economy. Putin is therefore facing the sort of defeat in Ukraine which hopefully will rouse the Russian parliament, Russian people and Russian generals to frogmarch him out of the Kremlin into a disgraceful retirement. Or worse.