A chilling tale of foresight and disbelief: how the CIA and MI6 predicted Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and why no one believed them.
In November 2021, William Burns, the CIA director, embarked on a mission to Moscow, tasked with delivering a dire warning to Vladimir Putin. US intelligence had picked up worrying signals that Putin might be planning an invasion of Ukraine. Burns was to convey the potential consequences of such an action, but he faced an increasingly inaccessible and paranoid Russian leader.
During a tense phone call, Burns laid out the US belief that Russia was preparing for an invasion. However, Putin ignored the warning, instead focusing on his own concerns about American military presence near the Black Sea. The conversation, coupled with subsequent discussions with Putin's security officials, left Burns deeply concerned about the prospect of war.
Despite Burns' gut feeling, and the detailed intelligence gathered by Washington and London, other countries' intelligence services remained skeptical. The European services, remembering the dubious intelligence used to justify the Iraq invasion, were wary of trusting the Americans' prediction of a full-scale war in Europe.
Most shockingly, the Ukrainian government itself was unprepared. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, elected on a platform of peace negotiations, spent months dismissing American warnings as scaremongering. Even as the intelligence became more urgent, Zelenskyy quashed concerns among his military and intelligence elite, leaving Ukraine ill-prepared for the impending assault.
"In the final weeks, the intelligence leaders were starting to get it, the mood was different," said a US intelligence official. "But the political leadership just refused to accept it until right at the end."
As we reflect on these events, one lesson stands out: it is dangerous to dismiss scenarios as irrational or impossible. The world has become increasingly unpredictable, and the Ukraine invasion serves as a stark reminder of the importance of considering all possibilities.
"I felt the evidence we presented to them was overwhelming," said Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser. "They were just seized with the conviction that this simply made no sense."
The story of how Putin's plans unfolded, and the intelligence failures that preceded the invasion, is a cautionary tale for the intelligence community and a reminder of the high stakes involved in international relations.
