4: 3. US Intelligence Successes vs. Policy Failures Leading to the 2022 Invasion. Serhii Plokhy (Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University) details the period leading to the February 2022 invasion, where Russia positioned troops along the border,

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🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

3. US Intelligence Successes vs. Policy Failures Leading to the 2022 Invasion. Serhii Plokhy (Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University) details the period leading to the February 2022 invasion, where Russia positioned troops along the border, while the Biden administration publicly ruled out sending US troops or weapons to Ukraine. This policy is identified as a "colossal misjudgment" of Putin. Although US intelligence successfully reported Kremlin war plans almost in real time, hoping to deter Putin, little was done to militarily strengthen Ukraine. The prevailing Western assessment—that Kyiv would fall quickly and Ukraine would be overrun within a week—was based on a massive miscalculation that underestimated the Ukrainian military and people's resolve. Vladimir Putin framed the war using historical claims, stating that Russians and Ukrainians are "one people." This belief, rooted in 19th-century Russian imperial ideas, led to the flawed expectation that 150,000 to 200,000 troops would be sufficient and that Ukrainians would welcome them. Putin's central aim, consistent since the 2014 war, remains stopping Ukraine's Western drift and forcing it into the Russian-controlled Eurasian Union. The countdown to the current war began after President Zelensky, who was an unlikely war leader elected in 2019, refused to implement the Minsk agreements according to Putin's destabilizing agenda during their meeting in Paris in December 2019.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is CBSI on the world.
0:06.3	I'm John Bachelor with Professor Serhi Ploki, Professor of Ukrainian History Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.
0:14.8	His new book is The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History.
0:19.5	The decision is made at the Kremlin by Vladimir Putin, his state security chiefs watching.
0:25.7	On the 27th, what we call now the little green man appear, gunman in Crimea.
0:33.7	A man named Exenov is identified by the Kremlin as to be the new prime minister of the Crimean Parliament.
0:42.3	This is very much an annexation by brute force of Crimea.
0:47.5	The puzzlement now, reading the professor's timeline here, is what the U.S. did, what NATO did,
0:53.8	how they reacted to what was clearly an intention
0:57.0	to brutalize and tear apart Ukraine. Professor, I know that there are second thoughts everywhere,
1:03.3	but your measure today, did NATO go along with the Crimean annexation because it was anxious about war, it was not ready to worry, it hadn't anticipated that Putin would go that far?
1:16.6	Why was there not the protest?
1:19.6	I know there were sanctions, but not the protest at the level we see today with a similar brutality by Russia.
1:26.6	I'm personally convinced that if reaction to the annexation of the Crimea would be on the same level
1:36.3	as was the reaction to the start of the all-out war against Ukraine in February of 2022, we would not have to date this big war that Ukraine is fighting with the help of its Western allies.
1:53.0	So the question is why there was no such reaction. And my explanation to that is by drawing historical parallel between the annexation of Crimea and Anschluse of Austria.
2:07.3	And the reaction of the West, collective West, was more or less of the same kind.
2:13.7	But yes, of course, this is a happy occurrence.
2:18.3	But isn't this fear that all the Germans have to live in one German state?
2:25.0	Isn't this true that the majority of the population in the Crimea are Russian?
2:30.7	Most likely Hitler would stop at the annexation of the Austria and would not go further.
2:38.0	Most likely this is an exception in Putin's behavior and he would not go further after the Crimea
	...

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