On the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin was convinced that the overwhelming majority (about 90%) of Ukrainians would support the Russian offensive and not resist.
Source: Bukvy
According to more than 100 insiders in the U.S., Europe, Ukraine, and Russia, intelligence was able to accurately predict the invasion scenario, but not its consequences. The U.S. and MI6 believed that Russia would quickly capture Ukraine, while European services doubted this, as they did not believe a full-scale war in the 21st century was possible.
Most importantly, the Ukrainian government was completely unprepared for the upcoming attack, and President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected increasingly urgent American warnings for months as panic and suppressed the concerns of his own military and intelligence elite, who ultimately made limited attempts to prepare behind his back.
In October 2021, the CIA and MI6 sent Ukraine data about a possible invasion. After CIA Director William Burns’ visit to Moscow, American officials went to Kyiv to personally warn the Ukrainian leadership. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace informed Zelensky in November 2021 that a Russian invasion was a matter of “when, not if.” However, the Ukrainian authorities responded passively, fearing panic and economic shocks.
At the same time, intelligence services recorded the activation of Russian agents and the preparation of a “fifth column.”
The CIA established that Putin could have finalized the invasion plan in the first half of 2020. In spring 2021, Russian troops began to accumulate near the borders of Ukraine. The U.S. received data that the Kremlin leader might use the annual April 21 speech to justify military action. During a meeting in Geneva in June, Putin barely mentioned Ukraine, but had already decided to invade with troops.
In Moscow, it was believed that only 10% of Ukrainians would be ready to resist the occupying army. The rest, according to the Kremlin, would either actively support the Russian invasion or eventually accept it, expressing only limited dissatisfaction.
The person with information about Ukraine that differed from the general position was Sergey Naryshkin, head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. He was remembered for an uncertain speech during a Kremlin meeting where Vladimir Putin asked the Security Council members for their opinion on Ukraine.
According to sources, Naryshkin knew more than others but was weak and indecisive, while Putin wanted everyone to be part of the decision. During the meeting, Naryshkin was scared but ultimately supported the Russian leader’s position.
The only person who openly opposed it was Deputy Head of the Russian Presidential Administration Dmitry Kozak, a long-time associate of Putin, acquainted with him since the mid-1990s. According to a source close to Kozak, he was shocked by the Kremlin’s plans but only fully understood them on the day of the meeting.
During the meeting, Kozak tried to convince the Kremlin leader from a strategic, not moral, perspective that an invasion of Ukraine would be a catastrophe, although he did not know if it was about a limited operation to capture Donbas or a full-scale war. After the meeting, he stayed alone with Putin and continued the dispute. His remarks were cut from the television broadcast. At the end of 2025, Kozak resigned from all positions in the Russian Presidential Administration.
The Kremlin’s expectations regarding Ukrainian support for the invasion turned out to be unfoundedly optimistic, the author writes. Even by Moscow’s estimates, about 4 million people could have resisted the occupying army. European intelligence believed that the Russian forces concentrated near the Ukrainian borders at that time were insufficient to suppress such resistance.
Partly for this reason, many European countries until the last moment did not believe that Putin would risk a full-scale war. For example, the French ambassador learned about the invasion only when he was awakened by the sound of Russian missiles in Kyiv.
Meanwhile, the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND), Bruno Kahl, arrived in Kyiv on February 23, when U.S., U.K., and Polish intelligence had already established that the order for the Russian attack had been given. Even after receiving orders to evacuate German diplomats from the city, he ignored the warning and planned meetings the next day. On the day of the invasion, Kahl had to be evacuated from Kyiv with the help of Polish intelligence through roads crowded with Ukrainians leaving the city.
“We did not believe this would happen because we considered it an absolutely crazy idea that they could enter Kyiv and simply install a puppet government,” explained one European intelligence representative. “As it turned out, it really was madness.”
As Carnegie Foundation analyst Michael Kofman noted, half the problem was that “we overestimated Russian military actions and underestimated the Ukrainian military.”
Zelensky’s bold stance in the first days after the invasion became another unexpected factor. Washington, like Moscow, assumed he would either be killed or flee as soon as rockets started flying. Biden urged him to leave the capital or even the country to ensure his safety.
Since then, Ukraine has been at war, with little time or willingness to return to the discussion of whether more could have been done to prepare the population in advance. However, this discussion may resume, especially if in future elections Zelensky faces Zaluzhny, the former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and current ambassador in London, who pushed for more active measures but was blocked. Zaluzhny said that the failure to properly prepare was very costly for Ukraine at the beginning of the invasion.
For European services that failed to predict the invasion, a period of self-analysis has begun. One European intelligence officer said they were furious at the failure and insisted on an internal investigation into what could have been done better.
“The whole point of an intelligence service is to anticipate when the next war will begin,” the officer said. “And we completely messed it up.”
As intelligence historian Hugh Dillion from King’s College London noted, people cannot imagine what a major land war in Europe would look like in the 21st century, so they thought it was unlikely to happen. Moreover, skepticism is usually the safer option.
The failure in Ukraine began to change this. As one German official noted: “The main lesson we drew from all this is that we need to work with worst-case scenarios much more than before.”
For many, the key intelligence lesson from Ukraine was clear: do not rule out possibilities just because they once seemed impossible.
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