The Terrible Truth So Many Experts Missed About Russia [View all]

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/ukraine-invasion-putin-is-ruling-alone.html

The belief that Vladimir Putin was bluffing, that he would never give the order for the nearly 200,000-man army he had spent months amassing on the borders of Ukraine to invade, persisted as late as 5:45 a.m. Moscow time the day of the attack, when, grimacing in a red tie, Russia’s ruler of almost 23 years announced in a prerecorded statement what he called “a special military operation.”

This was not just a shock on American political Twitter. It was a shock to many of the leading experts and policymakers in the United States, Europe, and even Ukraine. The head of German intelligence was so caught off guard that he was still in Kyiv and had to be evacuated.

But nowhere did the shock feel more profound than among foreign policy analysts in Russia, where overwhelming consensus, until that very moment, had been that Putin would never launch such a war.

Even someone as experienced as Sir John Sawers, former head of the British intelligence agency MI6—the role codenamed C in the James Bond universe—told me just a week before the invasion began: “The idea that Putin was actually going to invade the whole of Ukraine, topple the Kyiv government, and occupy the whole country, for years to come—I never thought that that was a realistic prospect.”

Among even the leaders who had spent weeks warning a major offensive was imminent, a tone of surprise was not too hard to detect in their statements. “I cannot believe this is being done in your name,” said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, trying to address, for a moment, the Russian people, “or that you really want the pariah status it will bring to the Putin regime.”

*snip*