Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 2022 deserves a place in history books for being more widely anticipated in Washington than in Moscow – or even Kyiv.

In the weeks before that fateful Thursday, U.S. officials, relying on their own intelligence sources, predicted confidently that Russia was going to attack Ukraine. In contrast, senior Kremlin officials seemed taken by surprise – judging by their faces – during the Security Council meeting on 21 Feb. 2022, when Vladimir Putin tore up the Minsk agreements by recognizing the so-called Donbas People’s Republics as independent, paving the way for all-out war.

Putin had apparently only shared his plans with a few trusted people like Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. However, the U.S. did not share details of their intelligence widely with its allies either. A fairly good proof for this is that the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, Bruno Kahl, was in Kyiv for talks on 24 February. He had to be hastily evacuated by car.

Poor intelligence is one thing. What is much more serious is that both Ukraine and her friends in the West systematically failed to anticipate a large-scale war. This has much to do with the fact that such a scenario just seemed too irrational.

Even in early 2022, when Russia had deployed more than 100,000 troops along the border with Ukraine, many experts argued that this force was too small to take large cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv without massive losses. On 24 Jan., one month before the invasion, a group of Ukrainian military experts argued that a full-scale invasion to capture........

© The Moscow Times