When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine commenced in the early hours of 24 February, with mass missile strikes and the advance of a land force from a number of directions, many important Ukrainian officers were being seemingly caught by shock. Some have been rapidly asleep.
There experienced been rumours of a Russian invasion for months, and the prior evening US and Ukrainian intelligence received information that pointed to an invasion that night time with just about certainty. Nonetheless there was very little in the way of past-moment efforts to fortify towns close to the border, or to warn citizens to brace for the inevitable.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was at property with his spouse and small children. Quite a few officers in demand of essential regions close to the border, and mayors of cities containing strategic armed forces targets, have instructed the Guardian in interviews above the latest weeks that they were in bed and woke up in shock at the sound of booms, fairly than acquiring used the remaining hours of peace coordinating the defence of their towns.
It is feasible it would not have built a distinction anyway, but as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reaches the 100-day mark some are starting off to appear back at the interval in the buildup to the war and check with if additional could have been carried out.
There is popular acknowledgment, even amid Zelenskiy’s fiercest political opponents, that his wartime management has been defiant and inspirational. But alongside with the praise there are also questions about all those weeks ahead of the war, in January and February.
Why did Zelenskiy continue being sceptical of the ever more alarming warnings from US intelligence that Vladimir Putin was organizing a full-scale invasion? Could he have accomplished far more to prepare the place? Would it have experienced a lot impact?
“We really do not want to initiate an investigation for a though, but we are not able to prevent it in the long run,” reported Volodymyr Ariev, an MP with the European Solidarity occasion of the former president Petro Poroshenko. He stated his social gathering experienced been pushing for weeks in the run-up to the invasion for the federal government to consider the menace of war more significantly.

For much of January and February, the Individuals ended up proclaiming privately and publicly that their intelligence confirmed there was a extremely superior probability that Russia’s military services buildup was not a bluff.
Zelenskiy, meanwhile, was impressing on the Individuals that he experienced to balance preparations for war with considerations for the financial state, and telling Ukrainians not to panic. “If every person thinks there will be war tomorrow, the financial state will be in actual hassle,” a significant-position govt formal reported at the time.
In the 1st weeks of the yr, Ukraine’s prolonged-prepared “territorial defence” constructions ended up formalised, and quite a few Ukrainians began to research for their nearest bomb shelter, as the converse of war hung in the air. But handful of people genuinely thought the risk was true, and several thousands and thousands of Ukrainians did not make even elementary preparations for the onset of total-scale conflict and weeks of existence in bomb shelters or basements. For some, this deficiency of preparing would have awful repercussions when the war did come.
A lot of people have been reassured by the calming messaging coming from senior Ukrainian officers. In late January Zelenskiy known as the repeated US warnings of feasible war a “mistake”. On 6 February his adviser Mykhailo Podolyak explained the possibilities of resolving the disaster as a result of negotiations had been “substantially higher” than the danger of attack.
Ukrainian officials became increasingly discouraged with Washington’s public warnings of invasion. When US defence officials briefed media shops that Russia had moved provides of blood close to the border, found as a signal of imminent armed forces action, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar, categorically denied the report. “The purpose of this sort of details is to unfold stress and concern in our society,” she told the Guardian at the time.
But as February went on, US officials grew to become much more and extra confident that the Ukrainians – and some European allies – were not getting the threat critically more than enough. There had been frequent phone discussions amongst a variety of senior officials in Washington and their counterparts in Kyiv.

On 11 February the US embassy in Kyiv known as in diplomats from a big selection of embassies in the city. The people ended up introduced to a secure part of the embassy, tiny groups at a time, and handed sheets of paper on which was printed info about the chance and severity of Russian armed service motion, in accordance to a few folks with awareness of the meetings. They were authorized to acquire notes but not to get the papers away.
Before long immediately after, the remaining US diplomats in Kyiv had been evacuated to Lviv. “It is not just time to depart Ukraine, it is previous time to leave Ukraine,” a senior US administration official explained. Various other embassies followed the Americans west.
Ukrainian intelligence was also obtaining its have information and facts, and all over 17 February it got term about a amount of Russian armed forces orders that had been signed off that proposed something big was brewing. But nonetheless there was disbelief that this could necessarily mean the Us residents had been suitable all together.
“Most men and women believed it would be restricted to some thing in the Donbas and the Russians would not try out the whole-scale procedure,” explained a resource close to the Ukrainian intelligence services.
Some individuals in the companies were significantly extra worried than many others. “You could inform from what persons have been expressing to you, and how nervous they had been, which overseas intelligence services they experienced contacts in,” explained the supply.
When the invasion did come, Zelenskiy and his group disregarded presents from western countries to evacuate, and offered spirited leadership that assisted kickstart the intense Ukrainian defence efforts.
For now, this bravery and resolve, as properly as the will need for unity for the duration of wartime, has prevented any backlash around attainable mistakes in the buildup.
Serhiy Taruta, a businessman and MP who in 2014 was the Kyiv-appointed governor of the Donetsk location, mentioned it was way too early to increase problems about the buildup, but afterwards a dialogue would be important.
“Of course there are a great deal of questions, the Russians were already drawing the letter Z on their tools and every person was declaring something is coming, and our guys below were saying ‘don’t worry’. But which is for following the war. Now is the time for the consolidation of culture,” he explained in an job interview.
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In retrospect, potentially the best argument for why quite a few in the Ukrainian elite did not believe the US intelligence could be precise can be identified in the dismal failure of Russia’s attempt to take the significant cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv.
“It just did not compute,” stated the resource near to the intelligence services. “A takeover of Kyiv and the complete country in a couple of days? We assumed it would be a disaster for Russia. And it was. We did not assume Putin could be that stupid.”