Why did experts fail to predict Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
Hello,
In this video, I discuss why so many experts failed to accurately predict the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Most experts at the time were saying that it was very unlikely that Russia would invade Ukraine. Of those who did foresee an invasion, many dramatically overestimated the capabilities of the Russian military and expected a quick Russian victory.
It's important that we learn from this experience and have a discussion about how the academic community can get it right the next time a major war is about to break out in Europe.
As always, you can watch the video here or read a transcript below.
Best,
Anders
Transcript:
Many experts failed to predict the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. And right now there's a debate going on about what went wrong. Why is it that so many people failed to see this coming? And it's a relevant question, both because it's embarrassing that the academic community could get it so wrong collectively, but also because we can learn from this experience. Why is it that our theories and the methods we use to study international politics, why is it that they didn't work in this case? And I was one of those who actually, I think, got the predictions more or less right. So, I feel that I have something to add to this discussion, both in terms of what it actually meant to get it right, but also what is it that I think so many other experts failed to see in that situation. So, let's talk about it.
If we go back to February of 2022, then most analysts of international politics would say that it's very unlikely that Russia is going to invade Ukraine. And in fact, by mid-February of 2022, many experts were saying that the crisis was already over, that there had been a scare, but that diplomacy was working, and now it was clear that there was not going to be an invasion. So, for example, you can listen to this clip from the 15th of February of 2022, where John Mearsheimer explains on the King's College YouTube channel that the crisis is over and that Russia is not going to invade Ukraine.
Interviewer: Do you think Putin had any intentions over the past few days or weeks, I guess, including, and months, including the preparations for what has unfolded over the past few days? Do you think he had any intentions of invading Ukraine? Or is this all just about embarrassing the West and creating a situation where the narrative can be changed slightly?
Mearsheimer: My view is that he did not have any intention of invading Ukraine, and he nevertheless understood that there might be circumstances under which that was necessary. For example, I believe if Ukraine was to attack the forces, the Russian-supported forces in the Donbas, he would come to their assistance, and that would probably involve a Russian invasion of the eastern part of the country. So, I think there's certain scenarios where he might have come in. But I think putting that aside, he had no intention of invading Ukraine. And there are two reasons for that. One are the costs and two the benefits. Let's just talk about the costs. First of all, if he invaded Ukraine, he'd own it. He'd be an occupier, and that would not work out very well. As he surely knows, when you occupy a country in the modern world, it invariably leads to huge resistance and all sorts of trouble. Putin is surely smart enough to know that invading Ukraine and owning it would be a prescription for huge trouble.
Putin is surely smart enough to know that invading Ukraine would be a prescription for huge trouble. Okay.
One of the reasons I played that is that I think John Mearsheimer is one of the worst examples of experts who has been consistently wrong about almost everything, but still continues to make very bold predictions without any kind of reflection about why is it that the past predictions were wrong and didn't work. But the truth is that John Mearsheimer was not alone in this assessment. What he explained in this interview was more or less the accepted majority opinion among experts in international politics. So, for example, if we take someone like Mark Galeotti, who's one of the best Russia experts in the world, then his analysis at the time was almost identical to Mearsheimer's. They were both more or less making the same argument, and that argument was that if Russia invades Ukraine, then it's going to end badly for Russia, that Russia is not going to be successful, and there will be all kinds of negative consequences. And then they were also saying that Putin didn't need to invade because he was already winning, because he had gotten the attention from the Western countries that he wanted, and now there was an open door for negotiations where maybe Russia could get some kind of concessions.
But there were also some people who did predict the Russian invasion, and these were especially military analysts who based their arguments on the kinds of military preparations that Russia was making and also on the fact that the United States government kept saying that they had intelligence that showed that there was going to be an invasion. But what many of these military analysts got wrong was that they thought Russia was actually going to be successful, so they overestimated the strength of the Russian military in that situation. There is a brand new report out by Eliot Cohn and Phillips O'Brien where they look at this aspect of getting the invasion wrong where military analysts have overestimated the Russian army, and they have made some very dramatic predictions about how Russia was definitely going to win, and it's just a matter of time, and it's inevitable. And I will leave a link to that report in the video description. It's really interesting.
But this has led to a strange narrative in this discussion about who was right in their predictions because there are some analysts now who promote the idea that if you were wrong about Russia invading Ukraine, and you said that's not going to happen, but you were right in saying that if that happens, then it will go bad for Russia, then you actually weren't wrong. You made the right analysis, but just incidentally, it happened to show the wrong results. But you were wrong for the right reasons, so that has created a kind of upside-down narrative where it's the people that were actually wrong who were right, and the people that were right were actually wrong.
And definitely, it is important what your arguments are when you make a prediction because the arguments show how deep your understanding is of the situation you're trying to interpret. And everyone is wrong about the conclusions sometimes, but when you talk about things like war and politics, then if you have the right arguments about how things are connected, then you still have a valid contribution to make, even if your conclusion in the end turns out to be wrong.
But there is also an element in this of just… it's just a bad excuse. And I think the most annoying thing about this argument that the people who were wrong were actually the people who were right is that there actually were some people who were right. So by saying that, well, everyone is a little bit wrong, then you're actually taking something away from the people who got it right, and you're also putting up a barrier to learning from the experience because you're saying that even though your prediction was wrong, then the analysis was still right and there was nothing you could have done differently.
You're also putting up a barrier to learning from the experience because you're saying that even though your prediction was wrong, then the analysis was still right and there was nothing you could have done differently.
And we have to learn from this experience because there are some huge problems with the most common theories of international politics that are used in universities and different places. And the most common schools of thought within international politics are realism and liberalism, and both of them have significant issues in explaining the actual events as they occur in the real world. And yet we keep teaching and using these theories at our institutions, and these are the theories that experts keep referring to when they make predictions about international politics.
So it's important that we use this opportunity to learn from the events that led up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to see if we can get a better understanding of what actually happened. So it's relevant to discuss what did getting it right in February '22 actually look like.
In my view, getting it right meant seeing two things. On the one hand, it meant seeing that if Russia invades Ukraine, then it's not going to go well for them. It's not going to be successful. They will be dragged into a war that will be extremely damaging for Russia. And then on the other hand, you also saw that they're still going to do it. Seeing those two things are, in my opinion, what getting it right actually looked like in 2022. It meant embracing those two things that there is going to be an invasion, but also that the invasion is not going to be successful. If you got those two things right, then you can say that you were right. And if you got one of them right, then you can say you were half right, but you can't say that you were wrong for the right reasons.
And incidentally, that was exactly what I was saying before the invasion. I was quite certain that there was going to be an invasion. And I was also quite certain that it was going to be a failure for Russia. And I said that, I said some of those things in my YouTube videos at the time. But I think the place where I probably expressed it most eloquently was in this article from a Danish online magazine. It's both in Danish and it's behind a paywall, so it's not really very accessible. But if you understand Danish and you want to reference something that I said back then, then I think this is the best reference.
But what I said in that article is that everything now indicates that there's going to be a war in Ukraine and that this is not going to be some kind of small war. It's not going to be a limited war in the Donbas or something like that, because only a full-scale invasion made sense for Russia at this point in time. But I also go on to saying that there is a very high likelihood that the invasion is not going to work and that Putin has repeatedly shown that he doesn't understand Ukraine and that he makes decisions about Ukraine that are based on wrong assumptions. So I argue that we need to start thinking about the dilemmas, about what we're going to do when this happens, because there are going to be some tough choices ahead, both about how we're going to help Ukraine once the war breaks out, but also about escalation management and those sorts of things.
I'm Scandinavian and we don't like to brag, but I think I pretty much nailed that one. And I think it's appropriate and I think it's necessary that I gently raise my hand when other scholars begin to promote the idea that everyone got it wrong and that nobody was able to predict the invasion for the right reasons, because I think it was possible and I also think I wasn't the only one that did it.
So if I had to point out where I think most analysts in the academic community back then went wrong, then I'd highlight two things. The first one is that most analysts failed at empathizing with the other side. It's this thing of having the ability to see the world through the adversary's eyes. And we just have to acknowledge that most political analysts in the West did not and still don't understand what it is that the Russians want. They don't understand what it is the war is about from a Russian point of view.
I think the strangest thing was this idea that Putin had already won the confrontation with the West before the invasion even began. That now he had our attention and the West was willing to negotiate about something. Because if you tried looking at the situation in February 2022 through the lens of the Russians, then that was clearly not the case. Russia had created this crisis, and as a result of that, the West had increased the military support for Ukraine. There were promises about future cooperation and economic support to Ukraine. In Sweden and Finland, they were discussing NATO membership, the United States was increasing the military presence in Europe, and NATO was more united than ever since the Cold War. So obviously, this was not a good and desirable outcome for Russia of this situation that they themselves had created. So I think it was just a bad analysis, but it's a conclusion that people came to because they looked at it through Western eyes. So now that the West is willing to negotiate with Russia and give some concessions, that we probably didn't want to give, then this obviously had to be a Russian victory. But if you look at it from a Russian perspective, then it was quite clear that this is a terrible situation and that there was no way that this could be Putin's plan. So there had to be something more in it, which at this point in February of 2022, could only be the invasion.
I think that's the first mistake that many analysts made back then to look at the situation through Western eyes and not being able to empathize with the Russians. The other mistake was not being able to see that the Russian assumptions about Ukraine were deeply flawed. So it's back to this old quote that it's often attributed to Mark Twain. I don't know if Mark Twain actually said it, but it's a good quote: that it's not the things that we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we think we know for sure that just ain't so.
So if you want to understand the most dangerous thing the Russians could do, then you have to understand the things that they believe to be true that are just wrong. That's where they will behave unpredictably or irrationally from our point of view.
To some extent, the second mistake is connected to the first one. It also requires you to empathize with the other side. And in fact, you can say that it's a higher degree of empathizing. Not only do you have to understand how they see the world, but you also have to understand the things that they believe to be true that are actually wrong. But it's more than that. It's also about understanding that international politics is not, in the traditional sense of the word, carried out by rational actors. This is a flaw that persists in many theories about international politics that we use today, that they assume that states are rational actors that make decisions based on a shared understanding of a situation. Because that's not the case at all. Decision makers are human beings, and humans are guided by assumptions and by emotions and all kinds of things.
So if we want to be able to predict the stupidest thing that our opponent might do, then we have to understand their assumptions about the world, and we have to understand that they make decisions based on assumptions that might be wrong. And I think that in the case of Putin and Ukraine, it's pretty clear that Putin has a long history of not understanding the dynamics, of not understanding what's going on. He has very strong opinions about Ukraine. It's a topic that's very important to him. But he has also consistently made bad strategic choices dating back all the way to before the decision to annex Crimea in 2014. These are decisions that are based on assumptions about the relationship between Ukraine and Russia, and the idea that Russia is a great power and Ukraine is a weak state. And it's the belief that if Russia puts pressure on Ukraine, then the Ukrainians will give in to the Russian demands.
So if we go back to the question of predicting the full-scale invasion in 2022, we also run into the problem of analysts themselves maybe having assumptions about events in international politics that actually aren't true. It was very common back then to talk about Putin as this strategic mastermind who had achieved great success with this bold decision about annexing Crimea in 2014. And this idea of Putin as a strategic genius, it carried over into the assumptions about what he might do in 2022.
But it was quite clear to me that Putin was not a strategic genius and that he did not understand the process of Ukrainian nationalism that he was up against. And the steps he has taken for the last many years in trying to bring Ukraine back closer to Russia, they have been counterproductive. They have created the opposite result of what Putin was trying to do. So the idea that Putin would take Russia into a hopeless, unwinnable, and counterproductive war was not really surprising to me.
the idea that Putin would take Russia into a hopeless, unwinnable, and counterproductive war was not really surprising
So overall, I think it's a good thing that there is this debate about who predicted the full-scale invasion in February 2022. And it's also good that there is a debate about what it meant to make that prediction and why such a big part of the expert community got it wrong for various reasons.
The way I see it, to get it right, you basically had to be right about two things. First, you had to predict that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, that there was going to be this full-scale invasion. But second, you also had to foresee that the full-scale invasion would not be successful. If you got those two things right, then you can say that you made an accurate prediction of the invasion. And I think one of the reasons why such a big part of the expert community failed to predict the invasion was that they were unable to see the world through the eyes of the Russians. They got entangled in ideas about how Putin had already won the confrontation before the full-scale invasion started.
Mearsheimer: Putin is winning. I mean, first of all, he's got our attention.
Even though that was clearly not the case. And then second, many experts were unable to let go of this idea that Putin was a rational actor and a strategic mastermind. So, they failed to see that many of the decisions that he had been making were in fact based on false assumptions, both about Russia and also about Ukraine, and that he has regularly made counterproductive decisions. So, it was not unthinkable that he would do it again.
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