My guest is Professor Sir Lawrence Friedman. Professor Sir Lawrence Friedman is Emeritus Professor of War

Studies at King's College London. His most recent book is Command the Politics of Military Operations

from Korea to Ukraine and he also has a must-read, essential reading, substact, to which you should

all subscribe. Welcome to the podcast, Lawrence.

Welcome to you. I'm happy to be here. We're going to try and only talk about Ukraine and Russia

in the next 25 minutes or so without getting distracted. So let's see how far we get. And first things

further, I don't want to dwell too much on the past, but to the extent that it might inform a bit

the future, what is your take

on why so many personalities in the political diplomatic military, think tanky establishment,

did not see the invasion by Russia of Ukraine coming two years ago?

Yeah, in which I'd include myself, because it was a stupid thing to do, I think is the main reason.

I mean, I can only talk about my own many conversations from sort of late 2021 into 2022.

And you couldn't discount the possibility.

I mean, people shouldn't discount the possibility of an invasion then

because there were so many Russian troops gathering around the border

and clearly preparing for something.

The difficulty was, first, it's very hard to find Russians

who actually thought there was going to be an invasion.

Secondly, it was hard to see what was going to be an invasion. Secondly, it was hard to see what was going to be gained by it.

I mean, you could sort of understand a limited operation in the Dombas,

but trying to occupy a whole country that was going to be hostile.

It seemed a pretty stupid idea, as it proved.

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