I’m a strategic intelligence officer. I used to be in charge of the Warsaw Pact forces in strategic…that was during the Cold War, but still, I have a good visibility on what’s going on in Eastern Europe. I used to speak and read Russian as well, so that gives me some access to some documents. And recently I had been seconded to NATO as head of the struggle against proliferation of small arms. And in that capacity, I was involved in several projects from 2014 onwards with NATO in Ukraine. And so, I know the context quite well. I was also monitoring the possible influx of small armaments in the Donbas in 2014. And I have also worked—because in my previous assignment in the UN, I used to work on the restoration of armored forces, so when the Ukrainian armed forces got some problems with personnel issues, with suicide, with all these kind of things that you had in 2014, also problems in recruiting military—I was asked to participate on the NATO side on several projects in restoring Ukrainian armed forces.

What led to the decision to launch an offensive in the Donbas was not what happened since 2014. There was a trigger for that, and the trigger is two things.

The first is the decision and the law adopted by [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy in March 2021—that means last year—to reconquer Crimea by force, and that started a build-up of the Ukrainian armored forces in the southern parts of the country. And so, I think the Russians were perfectly aware of this build-up. They were aware that an operation was to be launched against the Republics of the Donbas, but they did not know when, and, of course, they were just observing that, and then came the real trigger.

You may remember that—I think it was on the 16th of February—Joe Biden, during a press conference, told that he knew that the Russians would attack. And how would he know that? Because I still have some contacts, and nobody actually thought that the Russians—before end of January, beginning of February—I think nobody thought that the Russians would attack Ukraine. So, there must have been something that made Biden aware that the Russians would attack. And this something, in fact, is the intensification of the artillery shelling of the Donbas starting on the 16th of February, and this increase in the shelling was observed, in fact, by the [Border] Observer Mission of the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe], and they recorded this increase of violation, and it’s a massive violation. I mean, we are talking about something that is about 30 times more than what it used to be, because the last eight years you had a lot of violations from both sides, by the way. But suddenly on the 16th of February you had a massive increase of violation on the Ukrainian side. So, for the Russians, Vladimir Putin in particular, that was the sign that the operation—the Ukrainian operation—was about to start.

And then everything started; I mean, all the events came very quickly. That means that if we look at the figures, you can see that there’s, as I said, a massive increase from the 16th-17th, and then it reached kind of a maximum on the 18th of February, and that was continuing.

And the Russian parliament, the Duma, also was aware of this possible offensive, and they passed a resolution asking Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the two self-proclaimed Republics in the Donbas. And that’s what Putin decided to do on the 21st of February. And just after adopting the decrees, the law recognizing the independence of the two Republics, Vladimir Putin signed a friendship and assistance agreement with those two Republics. Why did he do that? So that would allow the Republics to ask for military help in case of attack. And that’s why, on the 24th of February when Vladimir Putin decided to launch the offensive, it could invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter that provides for assistance in case of attack.