The war in Ukraine isn’t going the way Russian President Vladimir Putin expected. And he’s certainly not the only one who was caught by surprise—the U.S. expected a rapid Russian success, with the Kremlin’s tanks inside Kyiv within days. Many U.S. officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House believed Russia would quickly conquer Ukraine when it invaded last February. But Ukraine mounted an effective defense, and the Russian forces have retreated in some areas after ferocious counter-attacks. The outcome of the war hangs by a thread, and the U.S. was simply not expecting to find itself involved in a major international conflict that could go on for years.
Former military officials and intel insiders have told The Daily Beast that reviews are underway after failures in human intelligence and “lethargic” analysis led to warped predictions. The misjudgment in Washington, D.C., was near-total. The U.S. did accurately warn that Putin’s threat of invasion was real, while some intel agencies—including those in Kyiv—sought to play down the likelihood of all-out war, but after that the biggest land conflict in Europe since World War II has confounded the world’s most extensive and costly intelligence agencies right here in the U.S.
The Ukrainians were clear from the outset that they would fight off invaders from the East with the same brutal dedication that saw Finland defeat the USSR in the infamous Winter War of 1939. So what went wrong back at the intel offices in Virginia and D.C.? Why did the U.S. not take them seriously enough? And was their analysis of Russia’s decrepit and weary army so badly out of date? In March, the odds seemed heavily stacked against Ukraine. At the start of the war, Russia had about 900,000 active military personnel across its forces, compared with Ukraine’s 196,600. But a massive influx of Western equipment and a stronger-than-expected Ukrainian offense has surprised observers.
