Here’s a bit of lovely speechifying from one of my favorite film characters, “I's looking behind us now into history back.” But “time counts, and it keeps counting” and there “ain’t nobody how knows where it’s gonna lead.”
While you’re skimming Google to find Savannah Nix, all of this is just an elaborate way of saying that this morning—43 days into Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine—I’m looking “into history back.” As in, checking out the predictions that media outlets and columnists made before the tanks started to roll. But before we get to the point where Vladimir Putin began to gather forces around Ukraine last fall, here’s a thumbnail sketch of where things have gone over the last couple of decades.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine learned quickly that Russia was far too busy dealing with its own internal issues and structural collapse to lend anything like assistance to former Soviet member states. That was underscored in 1995 when Kharkiv was left without drinking water for months after the literal collapse of Soviet-era infrastructure. Both desperate for assistance and anxious to put some distance between Kyiv and Moscow, Ukraine looked to the West for assistance.
But almost as soon as Vladimir Putin rose to power, he saw that Ukraine was a threat. It wasn’t so much having NATO on the doorstep that bothered the Russian dictator, it was the idea of a functioning democracy with a growing economy that bothered him. After all, many Russians and Ukrainians have close personal and familial links. How was Putin going to keep everyone in Moscow happy with an economy slogging forward under the burden of an authoritarian kleptocracy, if they were always comparing their lives to cousin Sasha’s thriving democracy?
So Putin set out to end that. He launched a series of programs to bribe Ukrainian officials, promote their own oligarchs, and ensure that levels of corruption pegged the dial. When Ukraine still seemed to be looking West, Putin brought in an expert on destroying democracies around the world, Paul Manafort, and set him loose to create chaos, break agreements with the West, and ink deals that bound Kyiv and Moscow. That included destroying deals that were easing Ukraine toward both the EU and NATO.
By 2014, Ukrainians answered Putin with a resounding “no,” ousting pro-Russian officials in the Maidan Revolution, which is also known inside Ukraine as “the Revolution of Dignity.” Once again Ukraine turned to the West, and overthrew the Yanukovych government promoted by Manafort & Putin, Inc.
Then Putin replied by invading Crimea and bolstering pro-Russian separatists—many of which were so pro-Russian that they were actually Russian soldiers or members of the FSB—in the Donbas.
That Russia was able to so easily take Crimea and seize areas of eastern Ukraine wasn’t a signal that Russian soldiers were great and Ukrainian soldiers were terrible. It was a result of Russia acting while a political revolution and reformation in Ukraine was still underway. The capture of Crimea was as much about the internal disruption Putin has spent over a decade building, than it was “Little Green Men” dropping in to secure the borders.
Putin was convinced that this action would teach Ukraine a lesson, reverse the Maidan Revolution, and convince Kyiv to beg to be let back into the Russia club. Instead, the 2014 invasion generated a new unity within Ukraine and increased their determination to rebuild connections with the West. Putin responded to this by sending ever more military equipment to the Donbas (if your internal rebels are driving around in tanks provided by your neighbor, are they really your rebels?) and continuing its efforts to fund corruption in Kyiv — efforts that Republicans from Donald Trump to Rudy Giuliani were all too happy to boost. Russia also took a number of provocative steps, like seizing the Kerch Strait, that were likely designed to test whether the West was still snoozing when it came to mounting a response (Answer: Yes).
Still, the election of Volodymyr Zelenskyy was seen as a big repudiation of any remaining pro-Russia sentiment and a solid middle finger to Moscow. Efforts to drag Ukraine out of Putin’s corruption and disruption shadow accelerated.
And that … is why is I’m no good at writing a brief thumbnail version of history. Anyway, Ukraine looked West. Putin spent 20 years trying to prevent Ukraine from building a functional democracy. Ukraine shrugged off the efforts. Putin invaded. Ukraine resisted. Putin fumed. Screw you, Vlad.
There.
Since 2014, Russia has teased a second invasion many times when Putin believed that Ukraine’s progress needed to be checked. So when all those Russian forces began gathering around Ukraine in the fall of 2021, it’s understandable that a lot of people seem to have responded with an eye roll and a “here we go again.” As Foreign Policy explained, Russia wasn’t actually going to invade. It just wanted a better bargaining position.
Except U.S. intelligence was getting serious signals that this time was different. Unable to cripple Ukraine sufficiently to keep them from evolving into a threat, Putin was going to do the other thing. Crush them.
How did all the experts and analysts respond? It’s not hard to find predictions that Russia would simply roll over Ukraine in The New York Times and other major outlets, or that the West would step back and do nothing. In fact, many of the media forecasts bear an uncanny resemblance to exactly what Moscow was saying. Because transcribing Putin was probably a lot easier than doing any actual analysis.
But there are some surprising nuanced predictions out there that don’t look half bad “in history back.” For example, Defense News didn’t think that Russia was going to go for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but there reasoning for this was pretty much—because Putin would be making a huge mistake.
“... it would be very risky diplomatically and expensive militarily for Moscow. Russia could lose. … The Western response to an all-out invasion could be fierce, including possibly providing airpower to Ukraine to defend Kyiv should Ukraine be losing the battle. It could result in escalation and a major war despite lack of an Article 5 commitment. Putin likely knows this. Therefore, he is probably—hopefully—deterred here.”
He wasn’t. Defense News actually expected Putin to go for something more modest and achievable, like just grabbing a land bridge from Donbas to Crimea through Mariupol, but they get points for the clear signal that a full-scale invasion was simply beyond the limits of what the Russian military could achieve.
There’s also this piece, from The Wall Street Journal, that calls a Ukraine invasion “a trap” for Putin.
“If Russian aggression toward Ukraine does expand militarily, however, it could spell the end of the authoritarian experiment that Vladimir Putin has fostered for the past two decades. In any scenario, it will also result in a much-diminished Russia.”
That’s a remarkably good call, in an article that also recognizes Putin’s capture of Crimea was done “from a position of weakness” and ties Putin’s threats to Ukraine toward how his own popularity had crashed following the mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis.
There’s also this analysis from Reuters, that predicts a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be “no walkover.” For the same reasons as the Defense News analysis, this leads to the conclusion that it would be “highly unlikely that Putin would contemplate an outright conquest of Ukraine.”
Honestly, while the biggest media outlets were running a lot of news stories that took Russia marching into Kyiv in their parade best as a given, there was no end of sources with analysis that showed exactly why that was unlikely. But there were far more predictions that treated Russia’s ability to invade and conquer Ukraine as a given, but simply didn’t think Putin would do it, because the cost would be so high. Any attempt to take the whole of the country would turn into a long-term slog.
“The invasion would not lead to the kind of swift victory Russia won in Georgia in 2008, or could have won over Ukraine in 2014. This would give the West time to react in whatever manner it chose – which, in turn, would make the outcome of the war less predictable and controllable for Russia. However, one can only guess whether Putin believes there is a credible chance of a substantive Western reaction.”
And that’s the point where most of these predictions failed—not in pointing out that Ukraine’s military had vastly improved over 2014, or that Russia’s ability to wage full-scale conquest was questionable at best. They failed on the Putin question.
They failed to predict that despite the high probability of failure, despite the enormous cost in men and materiel, and despite the staggering long-term cost of isolation and sanctions, Putin would push that button. The biggest errors people made weren’t in overestimating the power of the Russian military, it was in underestimating the size of Putin’s ego.
Thursday, Apr 7, 2022 · 2:28:34 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
There have been several of these warnings over the last two days that Russia could once again make a move toward Kyiv. In particular, if Russia is able to secure the area that it seeks in the Donbas first, then it could potentially free up additional resources to throw at Kyiv.
This seems unlikely, if only because Russia has already lost between one-third and one-half of its tanks and other armored vehicles. It also still lacks the air superiority that would allow it to maintain lengthy supply lines.
In any case, this doesn’t mean that Ukraine has to leave a lot of forces camped around Kyiv. If there’s anything that’s been learned in the first 42 days of this conflict, it’s that Russian forces have difficultly organizing and moving quickly, and that modern intelligence makes their movements extremely visible. They aren’t going to sneak up on Kyiv.
Thursday, Apr 7, 2022 · 2:34:09 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
The United Nations General Assembly is preparing to vote on expelling Russia from the Human Rights Council. It may not make a difference in the war, or really have a huge effect on Russia, but it is a good test of the world’s continued unity against Russian aggression.
Thursday, Apr 7, 2022 · 3:29:17 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
If Putin’s 2014 invasion was a miscalculation that actually drove Ukraine to the West, this 2022 invasion is an even bigger miscalculation that is driving everyone toward joining NATO. Even nations that long considered NATO as unnecessary have gotten the message that it’s an insurance policy worth buying.
Thursday, Apr 7, 2022 · 3:52:24 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
The United Nations General Assembly has voted to remove Russia from the Human Rights Council.
The final vote was 93 Yes, 24 No, and 58 abstain.
To pass, the resolution needed a 2/3 vote, but abstentions are left out of the calculation.
