The weeks and months before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in hindsight
As I reflect on the reasons for my own incredulity about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the weeks and months before it was launched, I often come back to the public rhetoric and practices that Ukraine’s leadership was pursuing at the time, in early 2022.
Surely enough, I thought a full scale invasion did not make much sense. But my thinking was also based on the following line of reasoning:
“If Ukraine’s government believed an invasion was coming, they would be evacuating border villages, building up defences, moving troops, have clear contingency plans for civilians shared with municipal and regional authorities. They have access to classified Western intelligence, and surely intelligence of their own, and yet they are doing none of the above: obviously, they don’t believe a war is coming.”
The Ukrainian government was insisting very publicly that no invasion was coming, both to international audiences and to domestic audiences.
Obviously, they didn’t believe a war is coming.
Even before the recenty published long-read about the months and weeks before the invasion, Shaun Walker had been reflecting on this point back in 2022, with an article discussing how “Some are looking back at weeks before invasion and asking if more could have been done”.
As one of the interviewees for that article put it, “Of course there are a lot of questions, the Russians were already drawing the letter Z on their equipment and everyone was saying something is coming, and our guys here were saying ‘don’t worry’.”
And what about area experts that were sceptical about the likelihood of an invasion? It’s right to question our own biases and assumptions, and the many implications of information asymmetry.
There’s a whole line of criticism associated with the unfortunate label of “Westsplaining” - blaming Western-European analysts for ignoring voices from the region and downplaying Russia’s threat.
Yet, in this most momentous of times, listening to voices from Ukraine was a major contributing factor leading observers such as myself to downplay the risks that an invasion was forthcoming.
Shaun Walker’s latest shows how people with direct access to a lot of information, did not believe a war was coming. These include people in different positions such as Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak, Russia’s lead negotiator Dmitri Kozak, and, until the very last hours before the bombing started, Bruno Kahl, the chief of Germany’s foreign intelligence service.
There’s a lot to think about, with the benefit of hindsight. Surely, there’s a lot of reflection for the intelligence community, and the policy-makers who had access to intelligence.
But analytically, I struggle to reach clear conclusions in terms of “lessons learned” for external observers and area experts.
Originally published in the Fediverse.
