Any military operations have multiple goals with different level of importance. I won’t argue that one of the points could be capturing Kyiv if lucky. Otherwise

Any military operations have multiple goals with different level of importance. I won’t argue that one of the points could be capturing Kyiv if lucky. Otherwise, putting pressure and distract military brigades while occupying Kherson and Mariuple were also on the list for sure. I assume military planning is made around probabilities and importance. If occupying Kyiv was the main goal, then we would have definitely seen Belarusian forces join the campaign, especially taking the fact they were less than 100 miles from Kyiv.