How Western intelligence agencies helped Vladimir Putin
The bloody consequences of misjudging Ukraine’s will to resist
Nick Cohen
September 29, 2024
Writing From London
Go back to 24 February 2022, the most fateful day in Europe this century: the day when Vladimir Putin sent his armies into Ukraine. The least discussed aspect of the revival of Russian imperialism was the miserable failure of Western intelligence.
It wasn't that Western analysts missed the invasion—they didn’t. The Biden administration and its allies did an admirable job. They warned Ukraine and Europe, and pre-empted Russian propaganda efforts to create a false pretext for the invasion. But their success ended there. They vastly overestimated Russia’s military prowess while grossly underestimating Ukraine’s resolve—a misjudgement that persists today, with devastating consequences.
Intelligence sources briefed journalists, who then shared these faulty assumptions with the world. “Ukraine’s paucity of air defences and the weakness of its armed forces means that Russia could drive to Kyiv perhaps as easily as American forces reached Baghdad in the Iraq war of 2003,” declared the Economist in the days before the invasion.
“A Russian military campaign could range from standoff strikes to a largescale invasion of Ukraine’s eastern regions, the encirclement of Kyiv, and the taking of Odessa along the coast,” said the influential War on the Rocks foreign policy site. “The question is not what Russia can do militarily in Ukraine, since the answer is almost anything, but what kind of operation might attain lasting political gains.”
“Almost anything”, eh? Tell that to Russia’s 600,000 casualties.
Not to be outdone the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that “Russia’s military is far superior”.
On and on it went. “Ukrainian forces would begin the conflict nearly surrounded from the very start,” opined the supposedly informed journal Foreign Policy, as it loftily informed its readers that it was a waste of time to send Western weapons to Kyiv – so assured was Putin of instant victory.
The intelligence failures were as great as before the Iraq War of 2003. And once again governments fell for them. So convinced was the Biden administration of the inevitability of Putin taking Kyiv in days, it offered to fly Zelensky to safety. “I need ammunition, not a ride,” was his reply for the ages.
As a report produced by Eliott A. Cohen and Phillips O’Brien for the Center for Strategic and International Studies this week says, “A consensus coalesced around an extreme vision of what Russia could accomplish militarily and a correspondingly pessimistic view of Ukraine’s ability
to resist. Analysts widely stated that Russia could open with a devastating blow [and] in the first few hours, Kyiv could be surrounded.”
Other predictive failures have resulted in introspection and denunciation. The failure of the intelligence services to realise that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction destroyed the reputations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. I have heard economists argue that their profession has never recovered the status lost by their failure to predict the 2008 financial crisis.
Yet the inability of the military and intelligence bureaucracies to understand Russia and Ukraine has not led to a serious debate. Cohen and O’Brien have filled the gap but they are lone voices in an “intelligence community” that has hidden its failure like a Victorian family hiding its guilty secrets.
There is a certain schadenfreude in recognising that esteemed members of the foreign policy establishment were completely wrong. But mocking the Economist or the CIA does not undo the damage they did.
Because the West believed Russia could simply march into Kyiv, we initially failed to send Ukraine the weapons it needed. Even today, there's a lingering belief in the invincibility of Russian power and a tendency to dismiss Ukraine's achievements despite everything its forces have endured.
The hard questions aren’t being asked. If Western intelligence misjudged Russia’s capabilities in 2022, how confident should we be today that the CIA is right to stop Kyiv using long-range weapons against Russia because its analysts have concluded that they might provoke a nuclear war?
Analysing why experts go wrong has become an academic discipline ever since Philip Tetlock produced “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” in the early 2000s. Tetlock’s rather alarming conclusion was that people who make prediction their business— the experts who appear on television and advise governments and businesses — were, if you will forgive my bluntness, full of shit.
The accuracy of an expert’s predictions has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge, Tetlock concluded. A moderately well-informed layperson could guess what is likely to happen as accurately as specialists.
Normally experts, and all of us, predict what we want to be true. But Western analysts did not want Russia to win. You cannot ascribe their mistakes to motivated reasoning.
Instead, as Cohen and O’Brien explain, the intelligence community was dazzled by data and ignored the messy realities of dysfunctional regimes. They failed to grasp the extent of Russia’s institutional corruption, its leadership’s incompetence, and the delusions that ran up the chain of command.
Conversely, Ukraine was depicted by outlets like Foreign Policy and The New York Times as a divided kleptocracy too weak to resist the Russian bear. “Insufficient account was taken of the
fact that Ukraine’s soldiers were defending their homeland and that its people were fighting an existential war for national survival,” the report concludes.
This was an extraordinary failure. The wars of 9/11, let alone the 20th century’s struggles against colonialism, ought to have taught defence establishments that people do not willingly bend the knee to a foreign occupier.
Unfortunately, intelligence experts were too easily impressed by the supposed “professionalism” of the Russian army. As the report acidly observes, “if it were true that the number of professional soldiers married to sophisticated technology invariably trumped motivation and self-belief, the United States might have done better in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The analytic failure in Ukraine makes a strong case for something so often lacking in military analysis and the academic world more generally: intellectual humility.”
No humility is on offer. Cohen and O’Brien have raised urgent and for Ukraine deadly questions, about the West’s fatal determination to overestimate Putin’s power. And yet as far as I can see their report has received no media attention whatsoever from the Economist, Foreign Policy and all those other great and good media organisations that fell for the empty predictions of deluded sources. It seems we are all expected to pretend that the West was right all along.
Nicholas Cohen is a British journalist, author and political commentator. He was a columnist for The Observer, and is one for The Spectator. Following accusations of sexual harassment, he left The Observer in 2022 and began publishing on the Substack platform.
