You are watching this video on August 18, which means that in a week there will be exactly half a year of the war.
Very timely on this date, a large review article was published in the Washington Post,
which not only tells us something new, but gives a much more complete picture of how this war began.
Today we will discuss what we have learned from this investigation and what conclusions we can draw.
In short.
Back in October, American intelligence concluded that Putin wanted to attack Ukraine,
and America was trying to reason with Russia and warn its allies.
The advisers told Joe Biden in blunt detail how the offensive would go.
The troops were supposed to go to Kyiv from the north, clamping the capital in a vise.
One part – from Chernihiv, the second – from Belarus between the Chernobyl
nuclear power plant and the swamps surrounding it.
Therefore, the war had to start in winter, so that the frost would make the ground hard enough for tanks.
They planned to take Kyiv in 3-4 days, the special forces were supposed to find
and remove President Zelensky, even kill him if necessary.
Then it was planned to install a puppet government.
In parallel, another part of the army was to move from the Crimea and the LDPR
and capture the entire southern coast of Ukraine to Moldova.
US Chief of Staff Miller called Putin's invasion plan a Russian version of «shock and awe».
This is such a US doctrine developed for the war in Iraq.
It had three components.
First, the target of the attacks is not only the armed forces, but the entire society of the country.
The attacks are to frighten the population so that they cannot resist.
Secondly, war is a performance for three audiences: native, enemy, and the rest of the world.
Thirdly, fighting on the fronts alone is not enough; an information war is also needed.
Unfortunately, we are seeing the use of all this by Russia in practice.
In addition to satellite images, interceptions, intelligence cited sources in the Kremlin
who were allegedly close to the president.
According to them, Putin's goal is to remain in history one of the great leaders of Russia.
Become the new Peter the Great or Stalin.
Without attracting the attention of the orderlies, I would like to say
And he understood that he did not have much time for this left.
And what did Putin choose to become famous for centuries?
To build a rich country – the second economy in the world?
Make Russia a center of science and culture?
No, Putin is not interested in all this at all.
He is obsessively fixated on the fact that Ukraine should become part of Russia, that it is not a separate country.
These are the findings of US intelligence.
According to the Americans, his obsession with this idea borders on some kind of religiosity.
Moreover, for him, the war in Ukraine is the path to the return of “Russian dominance in Eurasia”.
Why did Putin decide that there would be no full response from the West
and that this winter was a good time to attack?
American intelligence had an answer to this question as well.
In Putin's view, after the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration
has lost influence in Europe and will want to avoid new wars.
And then Angela Merkel, the de facto leader of the European Union, resigns.
What a shame, she transfers power to an untested successor, how is it possible?
This means that now any decisions in Europe will stall.
Putin gave Macron a task more important than some kind of Ukraine – elections are on the nose,
and the right is gaining popularity with the active support of the Kremlin.
There is also Britain, but it has become too weak after Brexit.
Plus, the European economy has not moved away from covid and sits tightly on the oil and gas needle.
If sanctions are imposed, we will turn off the gas.
It turns out, do what you want – no one will respond.
Much of the Washington Post investigation is about what the US did to prevent war.
In early November, William Burns, director of the CIA and former US ambassador to Russia,
is sent to Moscow to make the Russian authorities understand the scale of the consequences of the invasion.
Burns speaks to Putin on the phone from his aide's office.
The President does not deny any intelligence, repeats his old mantras about the expansion
of NATO to the east and disparages Zelensky.
Burns warns Putin, then Patrushev, that the Western response
to an invasion of Ukraine would be disastrous for Russia.
In response, he is assured that no one is going to start any war.
In parallel, the Americans are warning their allies.
Secretary of State Blinken informs Volodymyr Zelensky that a full-scale war will soon begin in his country.
Zelensky is well aware of the threat, but he has every reason
to believe that this is another political move by Putin and that in the end he will not dare to go to war.
There were two big problems in these negotiations.
The US did not want and does not want to disclose its sources in the Kremlin.
And without irrefutable evidence, it was very, very difficult to believe in the war with Ukraine,
even for the president of Ukraine.
But the Americans were also afraid to give Zelensky too much intelligence
so that he would not launch preemptive strikes against Putin’s troops in the territory of the LDPR or Crimea.
Now the United States has already changed its approach, but then they were afraid
that this would bring the Third World War closer.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba recalls that when they arrived in Washington in November,
a State Department official greeted them with the words: “Guys, dig trenches!”
While there were warnings, there was no documentary confirmation of them.
America provided real intelligence to Ukraine only at the end of February,
when there were only five days left before the start of the war.
The logic of Ukraine was this: is the threat so big?
So give planes and air defense!
Do you not want to?
And even intelligence will not be provided?
Well, ok, then we still think it's speculation.
In addition, Zelensky must have feared panic and economic collapse even before any war broke out.
But we must pay tribute to the President of Ukraine.
The United States warned him that the attack on Kyiv would begin from Hostomel,
that they would most likely try to kill him, that the threat was real,
perhaps the killers were already in the capital – but Zelensky remained in Kyiv.
He could go to the west of the country or even to Poland.
But he said that he would not go anywhere, because it would sow panic in Ukraine and then Putin would win.
Avril Haynes, director of national intelligence, went to NATO countries to talk about Russia's plans.
But in early November, she didn't manage to convince everyone.
And again due to the fact that the United States did not disclose all the intelligence.
Europe is divided into three camps, just like the experts on YouTube before the war.
The West believed that Putin was bluffing.
Central and Eastern Europe – that it will be limited to Donbass.
And only Britain and the Baltic countries immediately believed America and took the threats seriously.
At the same time, America did not lose hope to somehow reason with Russia.
Probably, even among them, not everyone was ready to believe that war was inevitable.
During negotiations with the Russian authorities, the Americans discussed security guarantees,
NATO expansion, and so on – everything that Russia supposedly wanted.
But the farther, the more they became convinced in the United States that Putin was no longer interested,
no matter what Peskov answered the journalists.
In January, the head of the State Department already directly asked Lavrov at a meeting:
do you really care about NATO expansion at all?
Or the whole point is that Putin is simply obsessed with Ukraine.
Lavrov, according to the Washington Post, simply walked away silently instead of answering.
British Defense Secretary Wallace bluntly told Shoigu at a meeting in February:
«I know the Ukrainians – they will fight».
Well, Shoigu thinks that he knows Ukrainians better.
And in general, he said that his mother was Ukrainian and “Russians and Ukrainians are all one nation”.
More to the golden fund of quotes: in response to the threat of deadly sanctions, Shoigu replied:
«Russians know how to suffer like no other».
At the same time, exactly in the same dialogue, our defense minister continued
to say that Russia was not going to attack anyone.
The closer the war was, the more countries believed America, but it was too late to prevent anything.
Putin made all the decisions, and no visits and calls from Macron had any effect on him.
He launched an invasion.
Now the advertisement, and then we'll talk about what is surprising we now know after reading the article.
ADS
The main thing in the Washington Post article is, of course, the degree of awareness of American intelligence.
Because we know for sure that the apparatus of the Russian state was not ready for war,
that no one, except for the narrowest circle, knew about Putin's plans.
Propaganda didn't know.
We saw with our own eyes how, in the first weeks of the war,
manuals were invented on the run, there was no intelligible concept.
It is from here that the letter Z is taken as a symbol of war.
The symbol is terribly wrong.
It hurts the eye, being embedded in Cyrillic words.
It looks too much like a swastika.
It does not refer to any cultural reference.
Where did it come from?
From the fact that propaganda needs a visual style of war,
and the tactical sign of the western group of troops has already been painted on equipment.
They took what was at hand.
This ugly verbal construction itself – “Special military operation for denazification and demilitarization” –
suggests that it was not invented by PR people, not by propagandists, not by people working with the masses,
but by dusty referents at the time of writing the text to Putin.
Because the name of what you want to pass off as a patriotic war cannot sound
like the third paragraph of a loan agreement for the purchase of a blender.
The oligarchs did not know about Putin's plans.
In the first weeks of the war, when the sanctions were fired like from a machine gun, their yachts,
accounts, real estate were taken lukewarm.
No one has taken the most obvious steps, not even physically moved their assets to safe jurisdictions.
No one even moved yachts to Turkey,
or to Russia.
The Government and the Central Bank did not know.
300 billion dollars from the reserves of the Central Bank were under arrest in the very first days of the war.
Starting a war in the center of Europe and keeping reserves in European and American assets –
does it sound like a great idea?
The army itself did not know.
From what is known today, all personnel, from privates to at least colonels – with the exception of senior leadership –
they were all convinced that they were on exercises.
This will come back to haunt the Russian army in the first days of the war,
when coordination between units will be completely lost, thrown into a task for which no one prepared them.
Looking at February 24 from today, we can clearly see that for the entire structure of the Russian state,
starting with Vladimir Putin's inner circle, the war was an absolute shock.
That the narrowest circle among the members of the Security Council was devoted to Putin's plans –
and no one else.
Nobody really prepared for anything.
But American intelligence knew everything.
Literally everything.
Moreover, it knew everything very well in advance,
since October, long before someone began to seriously talk about a possible invasion.
They knew it even at the moment when the first echelons of Russian military equipment began to move.
This is, of course, an amazing fact.
In a country that is de facto controlled by counterintelligence;
in a country where political power belongs to the FSB, where scientists are locked up in a pre-trial detention center
for foreign lectures under an article on treason – in this country, the level of awareness of American intelligence
is such as if its agents are sitting right in the Security Council.
Or even in Putin's office.
At the same time, we see that knowing the facts and correctly evaluating them are completely different things.
That the view from across the ocean can be eerily distorted.
American experts were convinced that the capture of Kyiv and the occupation of Ukraine
for Putin was only a matter of time.
And not abstract time, but several days.
Maybe not three days, as Putin himself fantasized, but a very short time.
It is clear where this belief came from.
The analyst put in front of him comparative tables of military potential, the number of tanks, aircraft,
missiles, guns, multiple launch rocket systems, warships in the Black Sea –
and made the most obvious conclusion: that this is not how they fight.
That Ukraine, whose military budget is 10 times lower,
cut off from the markets for heavy weapons for many years, forced to operate old Soviet equipment,
has practically no developed air defense and combat aviation, simply has no chance
in a collision with an army that has spent a trillion dollars for rearmament within last 10 years.
Apparently, this belief was connected with the fact that, knowing exactly about the invasion,
the United States did not supply weapons to Ukraine in advance.
What is the point if the war will last for several days anyway,
and all the new equipment will be in the hands of the Russians?
The problem with American assessments of military potentials is that formal figures do not give
an idea of the abyss of corruption and incompetence that flourished in the Russian army.
We had guesses, we all understood that the palaces of the Minister of Defense were not built by themselves,
we all understood that if the public institutions of the state were decomposed, then the army was even more so.
But in order to accurately assess the state of a large army, a big war is needed.
So, we understood: the second army of the world on paper, six months later on the battlefield,
lowered her expectations from Kiev and half of Ukraine to the village of Peski.
More than 5 thousand units of lost military equipment, of which almost a thousand tanks,
more than a hundred aircraft and helicopters – this is just what the Oryx project recorded,
counting from photos and videos.
In reality, things are much worse.
70-80 thousand people were killed and wounded, according to US intelligence estimates.
which there is no reason not to trust, as we can see from this article.
More than 5 thousand of them have been identified by name by the Mediazone as dead
The dry residue after six months of the war: despite Western supplies, Ukrainian troops
are still several times inferior to Russian ones in terms of equipment and weapons.
At the same time, Russia has already lost seven full-fledged divisions in killed,
wounded and equipment – one combined arms army.
This, of course, is a very interesting trap of analysis.
When a completely false conclusion was drawn from the correct facts.
American intelligence obviously knew everything about the Russian army and Putin's plans,
as if they were sitting in Putin's head.
But the trouble is that they also assessed the situation through the eyes of Putin.
Analysts simply could not imagine that with such a total superiority in all respects,
it was possible to fail the war so incompetently.
Because that doesn't happen.
But this is how it happens when you are an informational autocracy and your job is not to be, but to impress.
Sooner or later you yourself become a hostage of the impression you make.
The Washington Post article runs through this horror of American politicians:
our task is to keep Putin out of the war, because if he starts a war, then Ukraine has no chance.
We can support its resistance, we can evacuate President Zelensky, we can put pressure on Putin with sanctions,
but at best we will be talking about some kind of guerrilla-sabotage resistance to the Russian occupation.
This will definitely not be a war.
Putin thought the same way.
How do we know this?
We know this from the column of paddy wagons of the Russian Guard, broken up on the outskirts of Kyiv.
No war was planned.
A police operation was planned.
Aleksei Arestovich is absolutely right when he says that the Americans did not so much
warn Ukraine as they said goodbye to it.
Because such a striking fiasco of the aggressor did not fit into any forecasts.
Returning to the Washington Post article.
It can be seen how irresponsibly and carelessly the direct preparations for the war in Russia were carried out.
The Kremlin lied to the last, and lied to everyone.
The troops, who were about to face the enemy, were completely convinced
that now the exercises would end and they would go home.
The task of lying publicly had the highest priority.
For this reason, nothing was done to ensure that the troops had communication
and coordination by the time they crossed the border.
This, of course, is not the main, but a very important factor that saved Ukraine
in the most dangerous early days of the war:
the Ukrainians were faced with soldiers and officers who did not understand
where they were and what they needed to do.
The whole tone of the article is about confusion and amazement.
During the preparations for the war, American and British politicians and the military could not understand:
why?
What dark force ordered Putin to unleash a war in the center of Europe?
And with the outbreak of the war, it became completely incomprehensible
why it was being conducted so unprofessionally, recklessly and cruelly.
The Washington Post quotes an anonymous British official:
We thought they would invade the way we would.
In short, if we sum up everything we learned from the article in the Washington Post, we can fit into one phrase:
at first no one believed that someone was crazy enough to start a war,
then no one believed that a war could be waged so inadequately.
It needs to be finished with advice to the dictator from Maxim Katz.
Dear dictator, what did you lack for a normal life?
While you were threatening the entire NATO with war, while you were pulling troops to the Ukrainian borders,
everyone was running after you, persuading you, except maybe kissing you in the butt.
Everyone saw you as a demiurge, who has power in his hands that can compete with
the United States and smash the whole world into dust.
Well, you couldn't help but guess that the military hang you the same noodles on your ears
that the Chekists and all your entourage do?
Could you be smart enough not to check?
Not to send an army whose power lies only within your imagination, to a real war?
Here they used to march in parades –
and they would gladly keep doing that, and the whole world would be terribly worried about this.
And now everyone has seen what you're worth.
Now the flagships of your fleet are sinking, warehouses are exploding.
Now you are forced to rake alcoholics and criminals all over the country, under the promise of insane salaries.
Now everyone can see that it is not only possible to speak with you in the language of power,
but it is absolutely necessary.
It's one thing to deceive citizens about a strong army, but it's another thing to start a war.
It's not like rewriting the constitution.
Here you really have to win.
Dear dictators, you got rid of elections for a reason!
You do not know how to compete, you do not know how to war.
So don't start wars, dictators.
I warned you on February 15th.
See you tomorrow.