Russia never claimed or suggested they would capture Kyiv in 3 days. That came from US intelligence and the military, and was ultimately stated by Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [1] So it came from the same sources that planned the Ukraine counter attack, that repeatedly claimed Russia was imminently running out of missiles, that Russia's economy would collapse imminently, that Afghanistan would hold out against the Taliban, and so on.
It was only after these claims obviously failed to materialize that we started claiming Russia claimed it. Newsweek has an excellent article [2] covering what claims Russia did make. They are, at best, taken out of context, like when a media personality was going on a rant about an all-out conflict with the West, and how Russia must prepare.
We've had two years of reporting and analysis now and it's clear the Russian plan was for a fast and brief military/intelligence operation that decapitates and paralyzes the Ukrainian government and installs as a friendly regime. One particularly telling aspect (which was not as obvious in the chaos of the early days of invasion) is the substantial preparation and rapid deployment of civil administration resources into occupied territories - down to delivering Russian school textbooks. It's not particularly material what Russians claimed before they invaded, they planned to begin ruling Ukraine very quickly.
To me it seems most clear that Russia expected a negotiated settlement to happen shortly after hostilities began, largely to the point that their army was more for show than for actual use. And they would have been right had we not decided to escalate things to the international scale bloody and brutal conflict that it became.
The claims they actually expected to win an actual hot war in a few weeks are not very logical in my opinion. Ukraine is a nation with extensively highly fortified locations and they had large numbers of highly motivated, and well armed, fighters in nationalist battalions that would be 100% guaranteed to fight. And in a war where somebody is fighting back, you simply don't win in a few weeks - ever. Look to Gaza - that's basically a no holds barred war where they're just completely flattening everything with the latest Western arms, all to try to take out a group of 20-25k of people running around in t-shirts with RPGs. And that's likely to go on for years.
The USSR (as well as the USA) lost a war to Afghanistan, Russia lost a war to Chechnya, and more - all because of this phenomena. War without surrender against somebody who's fighting back is brutal, regardless of their inferiority on paper.
This is all very fine in theory but in the case of the re-invasion of Ukraine, we have, as I mentioned, plenty of evidence and 2 years worth of analysis. We don't have to think about this from first principles or parallels to other wars, we know what actually took place in Ukraine - from the operation in Hostomel airport, the effective and ineffective activated Russian agents, the prepared parade uniforms, the near instant deployment of civil administration, the ready 'filtration camps', etc.
And since you mention Afghanistan, the illustrative parallel is really this
Here I'd fundamentally disagree. I think all we have 2 years of completely unprecedented propaganda and "information warfare." Information about what's happening, and has been happening, is only now starting to make the Western news, as the war seems to be headed towards its terminal phase. I think we're only going to have plenty of evidence and meaningful analysis many years from now, starting November 6th, at the earliest. For instance, that Newsweek article merely debunking the claim about Russia claiming Kyiv would fall in 3 days was only published in October 2023 - more than 1.5 years after the war began, when that claim was being widely spread by our media!
I'm not entirely sure the point about Afghanistan goes against what I'm saying. Yes, the USSR destroyed the government, and highly motivated fighters continued to fight, and ultimately defeat, them. The exact same thing happened to us. That's, more or less, the point I am making. Russia knew extremely well there were relatively large numbers of heavily armed, trained, and motivated nationalist types in Ukraine. The only way they were winning quickly is if they could negotiate a settlement with the civilian government.
I'm not sure what the propaganda thing is about, we have strong evidence the Russian plan was for a rapid takeover, subversion/replacement of local elites, imposition of their administrative structures. This also makes plenty of sense as it was a key type of Soviet military and political operation and one in which they had plenty of balefully successful practice.
Afghanistan is an example of the successful execution of the initial military engagement of such an operation, the rest was unsuccessful but Ukraine is not Afghanistan - it's right next door, it has deep historic, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, you-name-it ties to Russia. It does have also have a long history of armed nationalist resistance. The Soviet Union successfully suppressed it at least twice and it's reasonable suspect that Russia would have been able to do so as well, especially given their methods. Each Soviet effort was followed by campaigns of direct and indirect forced Russification and much worse. It's worth asking yourself why, say, Crimea is full of Russian speakers. It's not because it's some historical cradle of Russianness.
During the Iraq War would you have ever imagined that the 'mobile chemical weapons laboratories', verified by 87 (or however many it was) different intelligence agencies, were actually just completely generic helium stations for weather balloons? That the 'high level insider in the Iraq government' was actually a taxi driver and thief with absolutely no connection whatsoever to the Iraq government? That the 'rock solid evidence of Saddam attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger' was actually just a poorly forged receipt? Literally all of the evidence we used to justify the invasion was fake, the exact same evidence that we had people like Colin Powell testify to the authenticity to, under oath.
So "we" don't have anything except claims from an active participant in a war who has been caught lying repeatedly during this war, who has a long history of lying prior, and who has every motivation to continue lying in this one. What's actually happened for the past couple of years will only become clear over the years to come.
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As for Crimea, it has a pretty wild history, but it's never been majority/plurality Ukrainian or even close to it. You can see a demographic history here. [1] At the start of the USSR it was designated a subregion of Russia, but was primarily populated by Tatars. Over the years leading up to WW2 many more Russians migrated to it, and relatively small number of Ukrainians. After WW2 the Tatars were accused of collaborating with the Nazis and deported from the region leaving it almost entirely Russian, which remained the case til the current era.
It was only in 1954 that Nikita Khrushchev granted it to Ukraine, ostensibly as a gift to Ukraine celebrating the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's integration into Russia. In reality it was part of a political power struggle of the time, and in the Russian world this is often referred to as Khrushchev's Folly, probably mimicking Seward's Folly. In spite it being a sub-region nominally under Ukraine, it remained populated primarily with ethnic Russians. And this never changed. The highest percent of Ukrainians was 26% in 1970, at which time there were also 67.3% ethnic Russians.
> The claims they actually expected to win an actual hot war in a few weeks
They were not expecting an actual hot war (hence the "Special Military Operation"). I think that the plan was to quickly capture and/or replace the government, have the country go into chaos, have good "patriotic" people already in place to act as with the new government, and then realign the country towards Russia.
Capturing Kyiv or at least forcing the government abroad was a big part of that.
But even assuming I was wrong, the main point remains: I think it is clear that they were not expecting a years-long hot war with a neighbor, and that is a massive failure intelligence-wise
This. One of the biggest surprises from Covid was how little the Intelligence community knew what was happening within China.
China wasn't even hiding anything, they cancelled the Chinese New Year and was telling everyone. And the West just ignored it.
My kids that play Plague and League of Legends were keeping up with the news from China, just for games, and just looked at me and said 'this is going to be bad'. At the same time early on when US Gov was saying it was nothing.
The IC knew. The White House chose not to act on it. Probably related to the whole “more testing means worse numbers and that’s bad for me politically” pathology.
Guess I'm still living in a fantasy world, still believe, that at some point the IC guys walk into the room, and tell the President, "sir you have to take this seriously", and wheels are set in motion.
You have to always look at the world probabilistically, and not focus entirely on results. Take a current event for example. Right now Texas has declared that they are under invasion [1], giving them a superseding constitutional right to self defense above and beyond Federal orders, and that's put them on the track for a direct conflict with Federal forces, should Biden choose to push the matter.
One person might say this is ultimately going to lead to a civil war. Another person might say in a month, this will all have completely blown over. Both outcomes are possible, and so what matters is the probability. There was obviously a probability that COVID turned into what it did, there was also a probability that it simply ended up being one of the zillion other localized little nasty plagues that emerges in nations and ends up remaining localized.
I'm certain you'd be surprised to learn of all the zillion potentially cataclysmic issues facing us all on a literally daily basis. That's how you get these hind-sight reports about how everything was always known but not acted on. Well yes, it was seen as a possibility and a potentially cataclysmic one - but ultimately the call was made that it probably would not come to pass. And the thing is, that may have been the case that 99.99% of the time, that would have been the right call. And we got to live through the .01%. It could also have been a completely idiotic call. Seeing leaked probabilistic modeling could help, but even then - models can be wrong, as they quite often were (frequently to an absurd degree) during COVID times. So, even there it's not so simple.
There's a timeline here. [1] We started screening at airports and ports on January 17th. The first tests were created (and found to be faulty) on January 20th, before China had even issued its first public warning. This was all even though the CDC still evaluated the risk as low, and it was not clear if human to human transmission was even possible. The Wiki does not specify, but it's implied that by January 27th formal testing for all relevant entrants became mandated as we reached thousands of people being tested. By February 2nd travel restrictions were in place, which many media outlets then framed as being racist - emphasizing how the public at large was still treating the virus at that point.
It does not seem like a poor response, in my opinion.
Right and the timeline says that in late November 2019 the IC said there’s high risk of it becoming a cataclysmic event.
Part of the argument against the Feb 2nd travel restrictions was actually that it was too late to be effective. COVID was already confirmed in the US in mid January. It had almost certainly already been circulating for weeks and obviously was definitely circulating internationally, which is why the epidemiologists weren’t advocating for a travel ban from China. I wouldn’t be surprised if it helped soften the blow a little bit, but there’s no way it was going to substantially change the course of events and there’s no way it’s a replacement for mass testing within the country.
Yes, “the public at large” was mostly wrong. The IC wasn’t. The White House was privy to much more information than the public and likely even more than CDC was. That’s the whole point?
Trump came out and said in June 2020 that he specifically told the federal agencies to slow down testing. Travel ban or no travel ban, that was simply the wrong decision and it was wrong for the wrong reasons (making his numbers look bad). There’s being wrong because reality is hard to parse in the moment, or because you have incomplete information, or because mistakes just happen (e.g. the botched test manufacturing) and there’s being wrong because selfish political ends dominate public health considerations. Those types of “wrong” are not equivalent.
We need to get back to the probability point, because you're adding a word that is not in the article you linked, nor any article to my knowledge. From the article you linked:
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"Analysts concluded [unknown disease] could be a cataclysmic event," one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. "It was then briefed multiple times to" the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. Wednesday night, the Pentagon issued a statement denying the "product/assessment" existed.
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There is no mention of high risk anywhere. It's just another risk among countless others. In this particular case the wording of your article is also suggestive that the initial reports were not even concerned about it coming stateside, but rather its impact on the US forces in the region. It only made it to the President's daily briefing, and seemingly only once at that, sometime in January. Also remember even well into January it wasn't clear if human transmission was possible, and it was initially have thought to have come from an animal that US forces could potentially have been exposed to - like malaria, for example.
Yes, there was lots of uncertainty and for sure we do not know how many "potentially cataclysmic events" appear in the PDB on a weekly basis. That uncertainty is predictable and in fact is written directly into the NSC's pandemic playbook. However, looking at that same playbook, it's a little difficult to get from the information we had at any given point to "do absolutely nothing in January", then "close the borders to China in Feb", then "slow down testing to make your numbers look better." The first two errors are pretty understandable IMO, but the last one is not. Your argument is "we didn't know that much," and I agree, it was hard to understand. My argument is that the White House, per its own admission, was actively trying not to know much.
Of course the issue is that the administration did not use the NSC's playbook, or apparently any other playbook, per their own admission. That's another unforgivable error.
I linked to a timeline [1] above. We most certainly didn't "do nothing", if you'll excuse the double negative. I do agree with you that the White House actively tried to avoid creating a panic in people, which one can argue was good or bad. But in terms of their actual actions, I don't see too many things that I would have changed, without hindsight.
Though I'd add that even with hindsight, it's not easy to come up with suggestions - because many different countries throughout the world tried all sorts of different approaches, and there was never any real silver bullet. And of course those efforts also, themselves, have consequences which we will be dealing with for years to come. So one has to balance the cost of a solution, rather than just looking for a solution under the logic that it MUST be better than doing nothing (which I am not implying would be ideal either).
Let me 'append' my previous claim then. I don't know anything I would have done differently than I'd expect to have significantly have changed the outcome. Obviously juking the numbers, or trying to at least, is stupid (that goes for lowering and increasing). On the other hand, I don't expect that played a meaningful role in what played out, well excepting some sort of butterfly effect argument - but with such, one can argue literally anything.
Isn’t the whole premise of your claim that making good decisions in lieu of good information is very hard? Wouldn’t better, more widespread testing earlier on have helped us understand the severity of the disease, which populations were at particular risk and which were not, which geographies most needed injections of medical supplies and expertise, which social interventions were making a dent and which weren’t, whether and where schools needed to be closed?
There were tons of extremely important, extremely consequential decisions that had to be made without information we [maybe] could’ve had. I suppose one could argue that Trump probably wasn’t successful/consequential in slowing down testing (I presume we’ll never know), but I don’t think you can argue that the velocity of testing was inconsequential.
Even with all the data we have now, I'm not sure there's any real silver bullets. Don't just look to the US, but look everywhere. You have a really wide sample of approaches. Some countries went ultra authoritarian and forced just about every intervention imaginable - and then some beyond that, while other countries did pretty much nothing, and then you had a mixture of everything in between. Yet after all is said and done, when you look at the actual death rates - everybody tended to fall within a fraction of a percent of each other, with outliers largely due to demographic reasons. For instance India had an extremely low death rate, but that was probably mostly because they have quite a young population.
And essentially all interventions came with major costs. For a hypothetical, imagine that we know for a fact that school closures saved 5,000 lives. But you also know that you damaged the mental and social development of millions of students. Development from which it seems many of this generation may simply never recover from. It's not like there's a good choice, because both options completely suck. Of all the things we tried, it doesn't seem there was any sort of "free lunch" where you got a really significant benefit with no cost. Everything came with costs, and those costs were often extremely high.
I don't understand which nation is supposed to have competent intelligence? Just look at the predictions made for Ukraine, Afghanistan, etc. and how they turned out.
In general it seems to me that we've largely replaced the prior eras of on-the-ground intelligence and entrenched spies working their way up institutions, with digital and satellite surveillance. If anything modern tech and widespread surveillance in many nations may make it much more difficult to have those high level entrenched spies. The times of things like a spy dressing up in disguise to make his way to the telegram station and sending an encoded message are long since gone. Our modern means "feel" so much more private, yet in reality are paradoxically surveilled and broadcast to a million times more people.
It could go a long way towards explaining many things.
Does that actually help in preventing conflict though?
Consider that both sides of US politics receive the same intelligence briefs on Russia V Ukraine, on alleged interference in US elections, on alleged US civil insurrection attempting interference in election results, etc.
Does todays "unquestionably better intelligence" result in different sides being aligned wrt interpreting this better intelligence?
Is it though? It seems many countries are too busy surveilling their own citizens facebook postings, emails and iphones than actually preventing bad things from happening around the world - one failure after another.
Sure, still, humans in the loop making decisions on where to spend their attention and time. One example of improvement, there are satellites surveilling the entire globe continuously, that did not exist in the past -- very limited ability to get this information without flying planes and risking resources.
