intelligence community predicted was spot-on,” he said. “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.” “Undoubtedly, it was a great intelligence success,” said Konrad Muzyka, a Polish-based defense analyst. “The big call that the Americans and British made turned out to be right,” he told RFE/RL. officials and their British counterparts were correct in their predictions that Putin would order the invasion to go forward. In an interview, Freedman said that, in hindsight, both U.S. “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.” “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. 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. Wrong.Īnd 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. 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. 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.
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