We already knew that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s stated justifications for invading Ukraine don’t withstand serious analysis. First, he claimed to be conducting a peacekeeping initiative in two breakaway territories controlled by pro-Russian separatists, in response to “the will of the people” in both territories—even though there has never been a referendum in those areas. Then he claimed Russia had a duty to pacify and “de-Nazify” Ukraine—even though its president is not only Jewish, but both the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and great-grandson of a Holocaust victim.
But knowing that Putin is engaging in blatant alternative facting is one thing; proving it is another. And now we may have that proof. According to the head of intelligence for a major security consulting firm, Ukraine’s defense ministry got its hands on proof that Russia had already drawn up plans for an invasion—in January.
Michael A. Horowitz, the head of intelligence at security consulting firm Le Beck International, dropped this bombshell as part of a long thread about the invasion on Wednesday morning.
According to those plans, the Kremlin approved these plans on Jan. 18—more than a month before the tanks rolled in. There are a lot of reasons why that date is significant. Literally the next day, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov was denying that Russia had any plans to invade Ukraine. Nine days later, his boss, Sergey Lavrov, reiterated this denial. Based on these plans, we now know that they were lying through their teeth.
The plans also detail an ambitious strategy: Overrunning the entire country in just two weeks.
In hindsight, that timetable sounds wildly optimistic at best. Putin must have assumed that his army would steamroll the country before the West had time to react. But even in the best case scenario, overrunning a country with a land mass slightly smaller than that of Texas, and with a population slightly larger than that of California, in just two weeks would have required virtually everything to break right.
As we now know, not much has broken right for the Kremlin. Putin obviously didn’t bank on the Ukrainian people rising up almost as one to fend off the Russian hordes. And he obviously didn’t bank on the international community’s nearly unanimous revulsion. As I write this, the ruble is now worth 102 to the dollar, or less than a penny. Russia has been all but cut off from the world banking system, and its stock market has been closed for three days.
However, several major Russian companies are still trading on the London Stock Exchange—and they’re getting absolutely pummeled. Four Russian energy companies that once had a combined market cap of $178 billion have effectively been reduced to penny stocks, after losing over 90% of their value. One of them, Lukoil—which has a decent-sized presence in the Northeast (mainly from what was once Getty)—crashed to as low as 25 cents a share. Russia’s largest bank, Sherbank, was trading as low as a penny. No country can realistically finance a war under these conditions.
For days, we’ve also seen widespread reports of Russian soldiers surrendering without offering any resistance—even sabotaging their own vehicles. A number of Russian POWs say they were tricked into going to Ukraine; indeed, some soldiers’ families didn’t even know their loved ones were fighting there.
And now it looks like we may have hard proof that every pretext Russia used to stage this attack was fraudulent. It can safely be said that Putin lied and people died—and are still dying.