In an interview with DW, Mark Galeotti explains why the West did not believe Russia would invade Ukraine and how he sees the war playing out in 2023

I have referred to Mark Galeotti, whose recent book I have read with much interest, in two recent posts:

Haberman (2022), Galeotti (2022), and O’Kane (2022) among others are exemplars of the gangster genre of literary nonfiction

Three authors with an in-depth, well-documented, balanced view of things: Haberman (2022); Galeotti (2022); O’Kane (2022)

The book I refer to is Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (2022) by Mark Galeotti

I was interested to read a Dec. 26, 2022 DW article entitled: “Russia’s Ukraine war based on ‘a disastrous miscalculation’: In an interview with DW, British historian Mark Galeotti explains why the West did not believe Russia would invade Ukraine and how he sees the war playing out in 2023.”

An excerpt reads:

I think there are still — regrettably — good intelligence gathering capabilities. There are certainly smart analysts. But if I think back to 2015, I remember talking to a former Foreign Intelligence Service officer who had said this seven years ago. Even then he said, look, we’ve learned you do not bring unwelcome news to the tsar’s table. In other words, it is politically dangerous to tell Putin things he does not want to hear.

This culture of insulating the president from inconvenient truths has emerged. And most of the time that doesn’t matter because he’s not someone who is really in command of every single detail of running the country. There is a huge body of technocrats and officials, some of whom are highly effective, who are managing relations within the country. Where it matters is where you have a key decision that he will make, he will initiate, he will push and that can then drag the whole country into this kind of disaster.