U.S. Statecraft on the Eve of Russia’s Attack on Ukraine
President Joe Biden’s final conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin took place over the phone on February 12, 2022. The two presidents had developed a no-nonsense rapport during the previous year on calls, video conferences and at an in-person summit in Geneva. By the time of the 2022 call, diplomacy to prevent Russia’s full-scale invasion appeared futile. In addition to massing hundreds of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s borders, Russia had stocked field hospitals with blood and prepared “legal” pretexts for war by putting recognition of the “independence” of the Donbas provinces on the Duma’s agenda.
The two leaders covered familiar ground. Biden warned about the consequences of a war – Ukraine’s determination to resist and the West’s resolve to hold Russia accountable – and offered suggestions for reducing tension. Putin repeated his complaints about Ukraine and paid lip-service to diplomacy. Ominously, Putin refused to entertain suggestions that Russia ease the tension by withdrawing its forces. At the end of the call, Putin was reflective, even resigned, intimating that a rupture in the relationship was on the way.
During the preceding weeks, our team in the U.S. government had used public statements and disclosures to the media to warn the world of the impending invasion and to try to prevent it. In the White House readout of the call, we hinted at the rupture by reiterating the commitment to diplomacy while noting that the United States and its allies were “equally prepared for other scenarios.” The call encapsulated the dual goals of U.S. strategy over the previous four months: to employ all possible diplomatic tools to prevent the invasion; and to prepare for the worst case by putting Ukraine and our other partners and allies in position to ensure Moscow failed in its plans to subjugate its neighbor.
The goal for deterrence had been to plant doubts in the Kremlin about the effectiveness of Russia’s invasion plan, deny the element of surprise, and encourage a reassessment of the costs (economic, diplomatic, reputational) that Moscow would pay if it proceeded. We were unsuccessful in deterring the invasion, and Russia started the largest war in Europe in over seventy years, but the effort was not for naught. Thanks to the use of intelligence in diplomacy, economic statecraft and public messaging, the United States, Europe and leading Asian countries were poised to provide immediate support to the Ukrainian people in resisting the invasion. We were also ready to impose sanctions forcefully and with one voice. We had succeeded in framing the invasion for the general public as what it was, an unacceptable act of aggression that all free peoples and states should resist.
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When Biden hung up the phone on February 12, my colleagues and I concluded that Putin had answered the question we had been asking since October 2021. Will Putin invade or won’t henot? That is the question we pondered in daily meetings with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. And we asked all the experts inside and outside the government that fall. We discussed it in small meetings with President Biden, in National Security Council meetings and in weekend brainstorming sessions in Sullivan’s office. Thanks to extraordinary work by our intelligence services, we knew that Russia had developed detailed plans to attack Ukraine and had revised and refined them repeatedly while massing forces on the borders. We knew from public comments and private conversations with world leaders that Putin held dangerously distorted views about Ukraine and was seething with grievances towards the West.
This question recalled a narrative principle of Chekhov’s: "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."[16] But history does not follow a pre-set script. Putin may have moved and loaded Russia’s weapons, but he still needed to give the order to attack; and he could change his mind. In our discussions, we reasoned that whatever Moscow’s problems were with Ukraine, an invasion would be catastrophic for Russia’s goals there, its status in the world and possibly its domestic stability.
My own assessment was informed by serving at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the attempted putsch in 1991. In the preceding months, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze (among others) had warned that a coup was coming. I discounted the possibility of a coup as “irrational,” because such a move would spark massive popular resistance and the sclerotic Soviet institutions (including the security forces) appeared ill-suited to organizing an effective takeover. However sound, this analysis failed to account for the motivations and impulses of the eight ageing men who launched the coup. Recalling this misjudgment thirty years later, I was acutely aware that Putin and his inner circle were products of the Soviet KGB, whose leaders had launched the effort to depose Gorbachev and stave off the USSR’s dissolution.
In late October 2021, officials from the DNI and its subordinate agencies warned that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Over the past decade, the United States and British intelligence services had gained valuable insights into Russian foreign-policy and defense decision-making. The intelligence they acquired detailed the battle plans, the size of the forces and the public narratives Moscow would use to justify the attack. The intelligence community indicated that Moscow would launch the war in February 2022. The accuracy of its predictions about the war over a hundred days before the fact was stunning. The United States leveraged these assets – time and intelligence – to mobilize an international coalition in support of Ukraine; prepare a range of consequences for Russia; and outcompete Russia in the information space. We also wanted to deter Putin from invading Ukraine.
The intelligence showed that Russia was planning to mass over a hundred battalion tactical groups (BTGs) on Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders as well as in occupied Crimea for a blitzkrieg attack. The primary unit of maneuver warfare in the Russian system, BTGs normally have 600-800 personnel and are equipped with tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery to execute combined-arms operations, including deep raids and flanking actions. While it turned out that Russia’s BTGs were resourced well below their mandated strength, Moscow’s forces clearly overmatched by factors of 3-5 those of Ukraine’s military on key dimensions such as the number of troops, tanks and artillery pieces. For added manpower, Russia’s security agencies were scrambling to assemble forces to maintain order and govern in newly conquered regions of Ukraine: the military was trying to recruit a 100,000-strong reserve force and there were indications that Russia’s National Guard, a militarized police force that was established in 2016, was preparing to take on public-order duties on Ukrainian territory. The Russian forces were not conducting exercises. They were preparing for war.
In parallel withParallel to the systematic mustering of soldiers and heavy metal, Russia was ramping up its information operations. Russia’s state-controlled television programming devoted more time to Ukraine, and officials and propagandists were claiming that ethnic Russians in the Donbas were victims of Ukrainian aggression, ethnic cleansing and even genocide. This amped-up venom could be interpreted as part of a diplomatic pressure campaign Moscow was conducting in the ongoing negotiations over the implementation of the 2014-15 Minsk Agreements, which had followed the Russian-backed separatists’ violent take-over of Ukrainian territory in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Few if any of Russia's spokespeople understood that their escalating verbal aggression against Ukraine presaged an actual invasion.
In addition to the media and diplomatic messaging, the Russian security services were concocting narratives to justify military action against Ukraine. One plan involved staging an elaborate false flag operation faking a massacre. The footage, including actors pretending to mourn deceased relatives, would then be broadcast. Real corpses would be procured from morgues. This fiction would presumably provoke genuine outrage, galvanizing Russian public opinion behind the invasion. It would induce sympathetic voices outside of Russia to sow doubt about who was responsible for starting the war. While intelligence analysts could not tell which if any of these false-flag plans Russian policy-makers were seriously considering, there was no doubt that the objective was to advance the Orwellian narrative that Russia was under attack.
According to some intelligence, Russia’s plans had been shaped to fit Putin’s magical thinking rather than to reflect Ukrainian realities. In 2005, Putin had characterized the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe for Russians living in the newly independent states. After violating Ukraine’s sovereignty with the invasion of Crimea, he began talking about “Novorossiya,” implying that certain southern regions of Ukraine belonged to Moscow. In July 2021, Putin published a pseudo-scholarly treatise on Ukrainians and Russians as “one people” and depicting Ukrainian statehood as an artificial construct foreign powers had invented to undermine Russia. In December 2021 Putin once again bemoaned the break-up of the Soviet Union, because it had enabled the disintegration of “historic Russia.”
Intelligence showed the evolution of Putin’s ambitions in his war plans. A decade earlier, Russia had declared itself the protector of Russian speakers. Now the goal was territorial expansion. There were plans to occupy much of Ukraine, possibly to install a puppet regime in Kyiv or to annex the land to Russia itself. Moscow, it seemed, intended to give former allies of Vladimir Yanukovych or other pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians leadership roles in Kyiv. Outside the capital, Russian intelligence agencies were developing databases of Ukrainian politicians who could take positions in “people’s committees” or assume governing responsibilities during an occupation.
In the east and the south of the country, many Ukrainian citizens preferred to communicate in Russian and had long favored constructive relations with Russia. Yet the notion that a silent majority in any part of Ukraine favored subjugation to Moscow was pure fantasy. For years, Russia had tried to cultivate networks of sympathizers in Ukraine, but this task became much harder after the invasion of Crimea in 2014. By 2021, Russians assigned to recruit the future occupation authorities, it appeared, were combing the internet for candidates who were affiliated with Yanukovych’s former party. The difficulty of finding Ukrainian collaborators intensified as the attack foundered. A core premise of the invasion rested on false assumptions. As Serhii Plokhy has written, “Putin and his ‘special military operation’ fell victim to the Russian president’s distorted view of history and complete lack of understanding of Ukrainian society and its democratic foundations.”
In retrospect, Russia’s invasion seems preordained. Putin’s designs were hiding in plain sight, the troops had been amassed, diplomacy was frozen and official rhetoric was increasingly strident. But there were plenty of counter-indicators. Within Russia, the people Westerners interacted with most frequently -- foreign-policy experts, business leaders, journalists and most government officials -- viewed the escalating tension as a critical moment in relations with Ukraine and the West. Few contemplated the possibility of a full-on invasion. Most Russia experts in the United States and Europe ruled out an invasion as irrational; Wall Street analysts pegged the chances at about five percent.
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Notwithstanding the uncertainty, a full-scale invasion posed such risks to Ukraine and international security more broadly that it was imperative to try to prevent it and to prepare for the worst, even if some believed the probability of it happening was low.
To deter Russia, we wanted to instill doubts in the Kremlin about the effectiveness of Russia’s invasion plan, to deny the element of surprise, and to encourage a sober consideration of the costs that Moscow would pay for an invasion. Political realities placed constraints on these options. U.S. military involvement in Ukraine was never on the table and President Biden publicly ruled it out in early December 2021. We were still determined to use the tools available and our intelligence agencies had provided us the luxury of four months to deploy all of them.
Given the hyper-centralization of Kremlin decision-making, direct communication with Putin was essential. As a first move, the President directed CIA Director William Burns to visit Moscow in early November 2021. Prior to the visit, we had crafted a way of revealing that Russia’s plans were known to us, spelling out the consequences of Russian aggression, from harsh economic sanctions, to continued U.S. military support for Ukraine, to changes in NATO force posture along the Eastern Flank. Should Russia agree to de-escalate, the United States was prepared to help resolve the conflict in the Donbas and to address mutual concerns about European security. To minimize ambiguity, these points were also detailed in a letter from President Biden to Putin.
Burns conveyed these messages to Nikolay Patrushev, Secretary of the Russian Security Council, and to counterparts in the Russian intelligence services. Burns held a one-on-one meeting with Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s chief foreign-policy advisor. During that meeting, Burns held a phone call with Putin, who was in Sochi. Confronted with the U.S. intelligence, Putin and his officials seemed less focused on denying the plans and more interested in building a case for intervention by questioning Ukraine’s legitimacy as a state, denigrating the competence of Zelensky and accusing his government of systematic persecution of Russian speakers. One official depicted Ukraine as a failed state whose citizens would welcome a Moscow-led reversal of the “2014 coup.”
Russian officials touted the advances in Russia’s military modernization and its economic resilience. They gloated about the reputational hit the United States had suffered from the chaotic departure from Afghanistan two months earlier. One of them even noted Republican successes in that week’s off-cycle state elections. Their message was that the United States should butt out of Russia’s business in Ukraine.
The mood was somber when Director Burns’ traveling party gathered in the Moscow Embassy’s secure conference room to recap the meetings. The intelligence in the previous weeks about an invasion had been worrisome but still detached from the people making decisions and issuing orders. The war became much more tangible after hearing senior officials repeat, with evident sincerity, Putin’s falsehoods about Ukraine and his hubris about Russia. Burns later recalled that he came away convinced that Putin had decided to invade. “My level of concern has gone up, not down,” he reported following his trip. In my assessment, the situation resembled a Greek tragedy in which choices made over the preceding years had set the protagonists on a collision course. Each move the Ukrainian government took to advance its Western ambitions prompted Moscow’s countermeasures, and every clumsy attempt by Russia to subdue Ukraine fortified Kyiv’s resolve to break free.
Diplomacy with Russia continued. In December 2021, Biden talked twice with Putin. In these calls, Biden drew on the vivid and disturbing intelligence, elaborating on the contents of the letter that he had sent in November and noting that the United States saw no sign that Russia’s troop build-up was stopping. Other indicators suggested Putin was intent on invading. Biden warned that the United States and key allies in Europe and Asia were united and determined to isolate Russia from the international financial system in the event of war. He reiterated his will to support Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity with lethal military assistance. Biden urged Putin to examine his own assumptions about Ukraine.
During a video call with Putin on December 7, Biden shared that he and the First Lady had gone that morning to the WWII memorial to mark the Pearl Harbor anniversary, noting the partnership between the United States and the Soviet Union in this period. Without bringing up Ukraine, he reflected on the responsibility leaders have when facing war-and-peace decisions. Like any Russian leader would, Putin responded warmly to the reference to shared sacrifices in the war. He evinced little if any appreciation of the forces his actions were about to unleash – for Russia or for Ukraine.
Putin paid lip service to finding a peaceful resolution to the crisis he had sparked. In actuality, Russian officials had no mandate to compromise. With Ukraine, they refused to lower tensions along the line of contact in Donbas. This reflected Putin’s conviction that Zelensky was a weak leader controlled by radical Ukrainian nationalists, who were implacably anti-Russian. The other prong of Russian diplomacy was to demand the U.S. and NATO sign lop-sided treaties that would roll back many elements of the post-Cold War security order, opening a path for Russia to reclaim a sphere of influence in Central Europe. The proposal barred Ukraine from joining NATO and rolled back changes in NATO’s force posture in countries that had joined the alliance since 1997.
The manner in which Russia rolled out these initiatives was telling. They were publicly proclaimed without any preliminary private discussions. This suggested they were more a prelude to war than a serious effort to find common ground. Nevertheless, President Biden and European leaders did not give up on diplomacy. They regularly compared notes and used the information to calibrate and refine their diplomatic messaging and public outreach. Putin had, for example, voiced apprehension about the prospect of NATO countries deploying intermediate-range missiles in Ukraine. This was a non-issue: the United States had never stated an intent to transfer such weapons to Ukraine. Seeking a basis for dialogue, we tailored our response to Putin's specific concerns and proposed putting on missiles of this range on the agenda.
During a late-December call, Biden and Putin agreed their senior officials should meet in person to try to find common ground. Within the U.S. government, there was little optimism direct talks would avoid an invasion. But consistent with the “no-regrets” framework, we resolved to pursue any opportunity to forestall or deter a war. To demonstrate good faith, U.S. officials and NATO allies formulated detailed responses to Russia’s proposed treaties. While we largely rejected the substance of the proposed treaties, we were willing to acknowledge that Russia had grievances about European security and we offered to begin a dialogue, provided that Russia’s destabilizing actions were also on the agenda. The presidents agreed their teams would conduct two meetings, a bilateral session in Geneva and a multilateral discussion in Brussels in the format of the NATO-Russia Council, a body set up for consultations between alliance members and Russia.
In January, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman led the U.S. delegation to Europe. In Geneva, her counterpart was Sergey Ryabkov, a deputy foreign minister with extensive experience dealing with the U.S. and someone Sherman had dealt with over many years during Iran nuclear negotiations. The Russian officials were more rigid than usual, effectively presenting their draft treaties as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Echoing Putin’s rhetoric, they portrayed Ukraine as a wayward Russian possession whose government had fallen under the sway of forces hostile to Russia. As to Russia’s military build-up, Ryabkov told reporters that “we have no plans, no intentions, to 'attack' Ukraine.... There is no reason to fear any escalation in this regard."
The diplomacy by the President, Burns and Sherman often felt like Kabuki theater, a performative spectacle having no bearing on whether Russia’s military buildup would result in war or peace. But it clarified that Putin was unwilling to accept a fully sovereign Ukraine and was still determined to relitigate the terms mutually agreed upon when the Cold War had ended. The diplomacy with allies was not performative in the least. By welcoming our NATO allies onto the Kabuki stage, they saw first-hand that the Russian players were play-acting diplomacy with no intention of avoiding conflict. And by sharing our most valuable secrets with them and listening to their doubts and concerns, we established a foundation of trust that fostered unity among NATO countries as well as partners and allies in Asia and elsewhere.
Why did deterrence and the proposals for de-escalation and diplomatic off-ramps fail? While overly simplistic, the best explanation is that Putin was unwilling to change his mind. We know that American and European leaders talked with him directly and at length and he undoubtedly was briefed on the lower-level diplomatic engagements, meaning we have high confidence Putin was aware of the likely reactions should he invade. Putin seems to have misunderstood his country’s military shortcomings and harbored profound misconceptions about Ukrainian society and attitudes towards Russia. The quality of U.S. intelligence was so detailed that we could see the poor quality of some of the information reaching Putin. We also know that key Russian officials harbored misgivings about the plans to invade Ukraine, but it is unclear whether these unvarnished assessments ever reached Putin. At times, we felt a bizarre solidarity with those inside the Russian system, hoping their messages would persuade the Russian president to reconsider.
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Even before it was apparent that diplomacy would not stop the full-scale invasion, our team resolved to invest the time and resources in preparation commensurate with the scale of potential crisis. As our assessment of the odds of war rose, the urgency and commitment to prepare increased as well. Sullivan created an inter-agency Tiger Team to identify options for policy-makers, to enhance deterrence and to ensure that we were prepared for a possible invasion. The Team organized a series of table-top exercises, some of them at the Cabinet level, to give senior officials a comprehensive picture and to identify gaps in capabilities or resources. The Tiger Team was engaged in real-time bureaucratic learning. Having spent most of August scrambling to deal with the sudden collapse of the Ghani government in Kabul, the administration was determined to over-prepare for future crises.
The “no-regrets” approach welcomed a broad coalition of like-minded countries. This coalition would prepare a multilateral response, including economic sanctions and support for Ukraine, and ensure that NATO allies were diplomatically aligned. In the weeks after Burns’ trip, diplomats and military officials shared the information with NATO counterparts and with key Asian allies. The ODNI and CIA actively conducted “intelligence diplomacy,” encouraging in-depth dialogue about the intelligence. Unsurprisingly, countries had varied reactions to the U.S. presentations. Even if foreign officials accepted the underlying intelligence, there were often debates about how to interpret it.
Many Europeans – as well as Americans – tested the warnings about an imminent invasion with contacts within the Russian elite. In this instance,, although the adage that “those who are talking don’t know and those who know aren’t talking” proved true in this instance. Only a small circle of Putin’s top officials had knowledge of the invasion plans. Key officials at the foreign ministry, economic policymakers, think-tank experts and businesspeople were in the dark. These Russians told journalists and their Western counterparts that the U.S. claims were “hysteria,” assuring their interlocutors that Putin would never launch a full-scale invasion.
U.S. policymakers recognized the impossibility of reaching complete consensus with skeptical officials in other countries. They argued that a prudent approach would take account of the worst case and plan accordingly. This pragmatic modus vivendi allowed the conversations to pivot from trying to predict Kremlin timelines and decisions to making concrete assessments about the ramifications of an invasion and about the responses that should be prepared. Kaupo Rosin, head of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service praised the result: “Even though Russia was not deterred by the release of the intelligence information, what was achieved was that everybody was on the same sheet of music when the war started.”
Diplomacy and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine posed special challenges. Visiting Kyiv immediately following the Burns trip to Moscow, the State Department’s Karen Donfried and I met with Foreign Minister Kuleba and Chief of Staff Yermak. They seemed bemused to have two U.S. officials informing them about what they had known for many years – that Moscow had plans to attack their country. Over time, the discussions became more detailed. U.S. officials were able to share intelligence and to coordinate the deterrence messages and diplomatic strategies.
These interactions often left both sides frustrated. The Americans worried that Kyiv was not taking the new threats seriously enough. As with policy-makers in western Europe, the Ukrainians were likely being assured by Russian contacts that Putin was conducting coercive diplomacy. The Ukrainians wanted the United States to do more to defend Ukraine, to transfer advanced weapons and enact preemptive sanctions on the Nordstream-2 pipeline and other Russian interests. For economic reasons, the Ukrainians were acutely sensitive to talk of war and refused to mobilize their military to prepare for war. When the United States evacuated its personnel from Kyiv and advised American citizens to leave the country, tensions spiked.
Beyond the top-level engagement with Zelensky and his team, the United States and Ukraine had since 2014 built a dense web of relationships among uniformed military officers, defense-ministry officials, intelligence officers and diplomats. As the intelligence flowed through these networks in the months before the invasion, parts of Ukraine’s decentralized national security institutions heeded the calls and started getting ready. And in the final days before the attack, the posture of Ukraine’s leadership changed and the close coordination, particularly on time-sensitive military intelligence, helped Ukraine repel the attempt to topple Kyiv. Once the invasion started, Ukrainian society quickly adapted to a wartime footing.
The “no-regrets” mantra also informed the approach to disclosing intelligence publicly. For many years, U.S. officials had struggled to contend with what one RAND study called Russia’s “firehose of falsehoods.” Even when U.S. officials could refute Russia’s narratives by using their own intelligence, declassification had not been a high enough priority within the bureaucracy. Moscow’s disregard for facts, agility in using social media and capacity to generate large volumes of material quickly often left the U.S. playing catch up.
In 2021, precisely because Russia wanted to keep its intentions secret, President Biden recognized the first-mover advantage in the information space. Public release of some of the intelligence supported the diplomatic efforts, helping allies bring along their publics and keeping pressure on Moscow to explain its actions. Finally, disclosing the intelligence had a moral dimension: the United States has a duty to alert its citizens of potential threats abroad. In this case, we also had a responsibility to warn the world that, in our assessment, millions of lives and Europe’s security were about to be profoundly disrupted.
On December 3, the administration released a declassified graphic detailing the military build-up and Russia’s plans to eventually muster 175,000 troops for an invasion in the coming months. The story also included satellite imagery and extended quotations from administration officials. At the same time, Secretary Blinken openly warned Russia against attacking Ukraine.
Aside from the immediate impact on Ukraine, the high-profile release of intelligence had broader implications for the intelligence community and the media. Eighteen years earlier, government and media reputations had been tarnished when claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq proved untrue. Numerous post-mortem investigations had criticized political leaders in the Bush Administration for mis-characterizing the evidence about Iraq’s WMD program. They had identified significant lapses in tradecraft in the intelligence community and faulted the media for failing to challenge the claims of government officials.
In the winter of 2021-2022, journalists were wary given memories of the faulty Iraq intelligence and the perception that the media had been an accessory in selling the war. According to New York Times correspondent David Sanger, the Ukraine intelligence releases were a source of interest and of skepticism. Although Sanger did not believe the administration was distorting the intelligence, journalists could not take the reports at face value. Some of the government’s claims regarding the troop build-up were verifiable using commercially available satellite imagery. For other claims, the Times reported what administration sources said, at the same time highlighting that these claims could not be independently verified.
The NSC pioneered a process with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to identify intelligence information for release, to accelerate the approval process for downgrades and to ensure high-level review from senior officials. Week by week, the administration publicized more intelligence, about the size of the Russian forces threatening Ukraine, about plans for a puppet regime, about “filtration” camps to quash opposition in occupied territory and about false-flag operations designed to justify the invasion.
The intelligence revelations gave an advantage to Ukraine and to the coalition supporting it. Exposing and countering Russian plans and narratives – usually before they were even introduced – limited their traction. When the invasion took place, much public opinion was inoculated from the false claims and pretexts concocted by Russia. Because Russian spokespeople had vehemently denied the invasion would happen, their credibility was weakened.
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When Biden and Putin concluded their February 12 phone call, diplomacy appeared increasingly futile. The military build-up was complete, Moscow’s rhetoric towards Ukraine turned more strident and its institutions started laying the legal predicates for intervention – just as the released intelligence had forecast. We were still not 100% convinced Putin would make the fateful decision, but Chekhov’s pistol was no longer hanging on the wall. By mid-month, the Tiger Team had produced a lengthy playbook that prescribed the diplomatic, economic, military and humanitarian actions the U.S. government would take in the hours and days following the invasion if Putin decided to pull the trigger.
A previously scheduled United National Security Council debate on Crimea planned for February 17 presented an ideal opportunity for a “closing argument” in the fifteen-week campaign to warn the world about the invasion. At the session, Secretary of State Antony Blinken used the accumulated intelligence to detail Russia’s imminent invasion of Ukraine. He urged Russia to demonstrate its peaceful intent by returning its troops to their barracks and their diplomats to the negotiating table.
At first blush, Blinken’s presentation in New York appeared risky. It might evoke comparisons with Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN in 2003. Thanks to the previous disclosures and tight coordination with allies in the preceding months, Blinken’s speech was a no-risk move. If his forecast proved accurate, it would vindicate U.S. credibility. If Russia pulled back from the brink and negotiated, Washington could take credit for having advocated the path of diplomacy. Blinken said he would gladly accept criticism for being wrong if Russia de-escalated. He and other administration spokespeople pointed out that, in contrast with 2003, the United States was amplifying warnings in hopes of preventing a war, not to justify starting one.
One week later, Russia started the largest war in Europe in over seventy years. In June 2026 the war’s duration surpassed World War I, Europe’s original “war that ended peace.” Historians continue to debate the weight of responsibility to assign to the leaders who launched the fighting in 1914. When studying 2022, few will dispute Putin’s culpability, but scholars will likely puzzle over his decision-making: when he settled on military action and what factors caused him to take such a gamble. Intrinsically connected with these questions is why efforts to deter him failed. The perspective presented here argues that the U.S. maximized the use of diplomacy, economic statecraft and strategic information disclosures, albeit without the benefit of threatening or using military force.
The failure to deter had not been a failure to prepare. Those preparations fused the efforts of officials working on economics, military aid, intelligence, humanitarian issues, diplomacy and public messaging. Thanks to these efforts, when the war started, no one believed Russia’s false narratives, the U.S.-led coalition imposed unprecedented economic costs on Moscow, Ukraine possessed battlefield intelligence and within hours supplies of weapons flowed from American and European armories into Poland and on to Ukraine. International condemnation, voiced at the UN and elsewhere, was swift and broad-based.
None of this rescued Ukraine from the brutality Russia has inflicted on Ukraine. Nor does it detract from the Ukrainian people, whose sacrifice, tenacity and ingenuity saved their country, belying Moscow’s plans to take Kyiv in seventy-two hours. But when Ukraine entered its darkest hour, it did so with allies who were expecting Russia’s horrific onslaught and preparing to counter it.
Eric Green is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 2023, Mr. Green completed a 32-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service, in which he achieved the rank of Minister-Counselor. From 2021-23 he served as Special Assistant to President Biden and Senior Director for Russia and Central Asia in the National Security Council, where he helped design and execute U.S. policy before and during the war in Ukraine.
Illustration by Kennan Institute Creative Director Jude Schroder.