WAR IN UKRAINEWhy Did So Many Get the Ukraine Invasion Predictions So Wrong?

By Mike Eckel

Published 17 February 2023

As the drumbeat of war grew louder in the months before February 24, 2022, many Western intelligence officers, military analysts, and political scientists believed Russia would not invade. Wrong. They also looked hard at what was known about Russia’s modernized, reformed, and well-financed armed forces — and many believed that if Russia invaded, Ukraine’s military would be routed. Wrong again.

On February 22, 2022, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, took a phone call from the United States’ top diplomat.

According to Borrell, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told him that Russia, after months of building up a massive military force on Ukraine’s border, was, in fact, going to invade.

“Tony Blinken phoned me and told me, ‘Well, it is going to happen this weekend’,” Borrell recalled in a speech months later. “And certainly, two days later, at 5 o’clock in the morning, they started bombing Kyiv. We did not believe that this was going to happen.

“We did not believe that the war was coming,” he said.

As the drumbeat of war grew louder in the months before February 24, 2022, Western intelligence officers, military analysts, and political scientists struggled to divine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions. They also looked hard at what was known about Russia’s modernized, reformed, and well-financed armed forces — not to mention the ragtag, underequipped state of Ukraine’s military.

Many believed Russia would not invade. Wrong.

And many believed that if it did, Ukraine’s military would be routed, Kyiv would be captured in a matter of days, and the government would fall. Wrong again.

One year on, as the war rages with no end in sight, analysts are still trying to piece together how most of the Western world got so much so wrong.

“Clearly, I did not make the big call, which would have been to join those who had been convinced for some time that a big war was about to start,” Lawrence Freedman, a professor emeritus of war studies at King’s College London, said in a commentary in late December. “I was becoming increasingly persuaded of its possibility, but it still seemed to be such a self-evidently stupid move that I assumed that Putin had better options.”

In an interview, Freedman said that, in hindsight, both U.S. officials and their British counterparts were correct in their predictions that Putin would order the invasion to go forward.

“The big call that the Americans and British made turned out to be right,” he told RFE/RL.

“Undoubtedly, it was a great intelligence success,” said Konrad Muzyka, a Polish-based defense analyst. “We’re used to talking about intelligence failures when it comes to the U.S.: the failures to predict the invasion of Georgia, Syria, all the stuff during the Cold War, the invasion of Hungary, Czechoslovakia.”