[denton-scratch]

This is true; and I find it hard to understand.

I mean, I can understand Zelensky talking it down; as the public face of Ukraine's government, I assume everything he says is propaganda of some kind (whether or not it's true).

But back in December, the satellite photos were showing the huge build-up of troops and armour on Ukraine's border. I didn't believe it was just an "exercise", nor did I believe it was sabre-rattling. I was convinced that an invasion was imminent.

I paid no attention to Snowden's opinion; he was a guest of the Russian government, and couldn't easily flee Russia.

[jcranmer]

> This is true; and I find it hard to understand.

It's actually not that complicated. The US intelligence services relied on high-level sources, essentially the military's plans for invasion, to come to its conclusions. European intelligence services tended to rely on low-level sources (the status of the units in question) instead. It turns out that the units were, even on the eve of the invasion, simply not ready for an invasion, and the European intelligence had sussed that out. In effect, when the US reported to the Europeans that Russia was preparing for war, the Europeans went "With what army? This one clearly ain't ready for war."

Combine those contradictory signals with the preconceptions that people had. The US intelligence had badly misfired during the Iraq War. There is a (not entirely undeserved) tendency to view the US as excessively warmongering. Putin had a (mostly undeserved) reputation of being a skillful and crafty manipulator. And Russia engaging in naked territorial aggression would require painful reassessments of 30 years of Russia policy (not least of which is the degree to which Europe depended on Russian gas). With all of that weighing against believing the US intelligence, it should be no surprise that Europeans did so.

[yreg]

I am no expert, but I too thought that they wouldn't do a full scale invasion. It seemed like a dumb move and I didn't think they would do dumb moves.

I have since learned to listen to what Pentagon has to say in this conflict, because their intelligence (and what they decide to share with the public) has proved to be on point.

[midasz]

> This is true; and I find it hard to understand.

Russia actually invading Ukraine full-on was the most irrational and self-destructive thing Putin could've done. By all measures it was and still is a terrible idea. Only if you thought Putin was a madman you could've predicted it but before the invasion that wasn't his reputation at all IMO. I think he was seen as relatively pragmatic and rational (for a thug).

[denton-scratch]

I agree that it looked like a crazy thing to do. But I'm not one of those who reaches for the word "madman" when someone does something that seems to me to be irrational.

With the benefit of hindsight, it doesn't seem so irrational to me now.

* Russia was under sanctions for the invasion of Crimea; the central bank had built up a huge stock of foreign currency, but it was only going to diminish with time.

* The Russian economy was at best stagnant, and largely powered by resource extraction.

* Ukraine was an impediment to land-traffic to Crimea (hence the need to build a bridge over the Kerch Strait), and also controlled the water supply.

* Ukraine was tooling-up.

For those reasons, delaying the invasion would have resulted in worse outcomes, the longer the delay.

As far as the justification for invading at all, you can take your pick from Russian fear of having a full NATO member on his Western border, or dreams of a restored Russian empire. I think both justifications are crazy, but dreams of a restored imperial glory are common among Russian nationalists. They can't all be madmen.

[InSteady]

I think it is astute to look at things in these terms, and avoid the lazy but quite common exercise of labeling motivations and actions you don't understand as "not understandable."

George Kennan, who came up in a recent HN post [0], has a fair bit to say on the subject. Namely, that throughout its history, Russia has been obsessed with expanding and securing its border for perfectly understandable strategic reasons. Especially regarding Ukraine and Crimea. Something along the lines of their western borders being completely open and strategically terrible to defend, thus the desire to push them out to more defensible locations. Of course you also have key routes for shipping, military bases, and oil flow in Ukraine that make it an incredibly appealing strategic objective. Kennan actually defined this mentality of western territorial expansion as an essential part of the Russian character, that it should be used as a backdrop to inform analysis of Russia 's motivations and contextualize strategic decisions (this was a key part of his analysis that ultimately lead to the whole "containment" strategy in the cold war).

It seems as though Western expansion has become completely ingrained basically to the point of a cultural imperative for any aspiring politician or political operator in Russia. Kind of like the requirement that any US politician must publicly proclaim their love of freedom and God in more or less equal measure (from what I can gather we've had exactly two openly atheist congress members, out of >11,000 members throughout history). In this way, it doesn't necessarily have to be rational in any absolute sense, it is rational in terms of national politics, beyond the point of expediency and into the territory of a binary whether or not you fit the hard requirements.

In 1992, Kennan wrote that NATO expansion towards former Soviet states in Western Europe including Ukraine, “ would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era... Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations; and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

He seems to have been largely ignored, not for the first in his career, up until Putin lead Russia to the annexation of Crimea. An act which seems to have taken heads of state and the international relations people by surprise, and perhaps undermined their optimistic beliefs about Putin having been coaxed into political/military partnership with the Western world (through economic incentives, international relations norms, etc). There was a lot of stock put on this idea that through economic incentives, trade agreements, and such, both Russia and China could be "brought into the fold" of neoliberalism and Western democratic principles. People were quite shocked to find out it didn't play out like a Disney movie with regards to Putin, and it's looking more and more like China isn't going to continue playing along with the tune set by the West when it is no longer in their strategic interest to do so.

Everyone from Obama to John Kerry to Angela Merkel were so perplexed over Russia's move in 2014 that their only explanations (including to each other in private, apparently) revolved around Putin being divorced from reality. However, as Henry Kissinger noted, the demonization of Putin is a stand-in for foreign policy analysis when there is nothing better at hand to guide us. So perhaps it is our lack of understanding of his real situation and objectives rather than his (of what is in both his and Russia's strategic interest) that is driving this urge to paint him as a irrational lunatic.

It seems likely that, as Kennan predicted, NATO expansion and general American/European policy caused a return of cold-war thinking and relations.. but only in the mind of Putin and Russian politicians. The rest of the world was out of step, and apparently wouldn't realize their error and catch up to reality until after that key moment in 2022, when just about everyone except US intelligence agencies didn't really believe the invasion was going to happen.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37374013

[denton-scratch]

> the demonization of Putin is a stand-in for foreign policy analysis

We tend to personalize nations, to the extent that we refer to the nation using the name of its leader. So, for example, "Putin invaded Ukraine". In fact the first time Putin even visited Ukraine was more than a year after the invasion.

What we generally mean by "Putin" is what during the Cold War was referred to as "The Kremlin", roughly Soviet/Russian central government. "Kremlinologist" was a term that referred to people whose job was figuring out what was going on in the Kremlin; civilians like me were encouraged to regard Kremlinology as impossible in principle, like Astrology, or reading tea-leaves.

I don't pretend to know what's going on in the Kremlin. But generals get pushed aside, and then re-hired somewhere else; officials get publicly humiliated on TV. I think it's faily clear that Putin is not in any sense an absolute dictator. He's the leader of a very authoritarian, militaristic government, in a country that is traditionally very authoritarian and militaristic.

I mean, I do think Putin's bonkers. But not based on his actions; I suppose his government's actions are the actions of the leadership clique, the "siloviki", i.e. the former KGB/GRU colonel-generals, turned oligarchs and government officials. I don't think Putin could have ordered this invasion without consensus of some kind in his clique. If his power were that concentrated, he would by now have ordered full mobilization, but it isn't, and he can't. [Edit] The reason I think he's bonkers is the things he says, especially in "On the Historic Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian People". But even that wasn't invented by him; those ideas come from "philosophers" like Alexander Dugin.

The handling of the Prigozhin Mutiny is evidence of that (Prigozhin is not siloviki, and was never KGB/GRU). If Putin were an absolute dictator, Prigozhin would have died the day after the mutiny, either shot somewhere very public, or poisoned using chemicals only made by the Russian government.

[phatfish]

Situations change, I can see how in the 70s and 80s this may have been an argument to keep the cold war "cold". But as the Russians have shown, there is no longer any need to handle them with care. Their armed forces are diminished to the point they can't successfully roll tanks over their own border and get a strategic win.

All they have left is the nuclear threat, which only protects existing borders (even for Putin holding Ukrainian territory is not worth having Moscow turned to glass by the return strike).

There is nothing to be gained by acknowledging the Russian expansionist "cultural imperative" in policy making now. Ensure the ex-Soviet states that want to join NATO and the world will be a safer place.