A very smart man admits he was wrong on Ukraine invasion
February 25, 2022 |
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| | | My Mistake on UkraineThoughts in and around geopolitics.By: George Friedman
Since the beginning of the Russian armored buildup, and even after the entry into Donbas, I argued that the Russians would not invade Ukraine proper. It’s true that Russia must recover Ukraine in some fashion to gain the strategic depth it lost when the Soviet Union collapsed, but that didn’t seem to require a full-scale invasion. I was wrong. Even so, I would like to take a moment to explain my thinking.
My mistake came from a couple of false assumptions. The first concerns the recent history of Russian “intervention” in its borderlands. In Belarus, protests erupted after Alexander Lukashenko won what was widely held as a fraudulent election. It’s possible his government would have buckled under popular pressure, just as Ukraine's had years earlier, if not for Russian support. Moscow turned Belarus into a vassal state without the threat of war, a soft but substantial increase in its power.
Elsewhere, after the Nagorno-Karabakh war last year, Russia mediated a cease-fire between Azerbaijan and Armenia, a key provision of which was to allow Russia to keep several thousand peacekeepers nearby. It was yet another soft coup that gave Russia a military presence in the vital South Caucasus.
Much more recently, there was an outbreak of political violence in Kazakhstan, perhaps the most important country in Central Asia. The government was destabilized, so Moscow sent peacekeepers to stabilize it.
Having watched Russia recover strategic depth through soft coups, taking advantage of internal tensions and local wars to stabilize the situation and recover strategic depth, I believed it would do likewise in Ukraine. The problem was that there were no divisions within Ukraine proper to exploit, nor any conflicts in which to intervene. More, I failed to appreciate that for Russia, Ukraine was too urgent a matter to be treated like the others.
My second assumption was that an armored invasion was simply too risky. The risks are real, of course. Supporting three armored divisions is expensive and logistically difficult in the best of circumstances, and vulnerable to missile attacks to boot. The U.S. said it would not go to war in Ukraine, but I assumed Vladimir Putin couldn’t take Washington at its word. Add to this the fact that the U.K. sent a very large amount of Javelin anti-tank missiles. Clearly, Ukrainians were training rapidly for the exact kind of invasion that is now transpiring.
I concluded that the buildup and “invasion” of Donbas was a bluff meant to create the opportunity for another soft coup. Russia already de facto controlled Donbas, so making it official seemed like a less risky way for Russia to flex without actually going to war. I rejected the idea that this would be the foundation of Russia’s military planning.
Trapped as I was by these two false assumptions, I then committed the worst error one can make in intelligence. After reaching my conclusions, and knowing that Russia was going to take Ukraine somehow, I either ignored data contrary to my position or took it as evidence that supported my position. I believed what I believed until I no longer could.
Ultimately, I didn’t attack my own theory. I failed to see its weaknesses. I should always be my own worst enemy. I failed to do so, and for that, I am sorry.
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