When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in the early hours of 24 February, with mass missile strikes and the advance of a land force from several directions, many key Ukrainian officials were apparently caught by surprise. Some were fast asleep.
There had been rumours of a Russian invasion for weeks, and the previous evening US and Ukrainian intelligence received information that pointed to an invasion that night with almost certainty. Yet there was little in the way of last-minute efforts to fortify towns close to the border, or to warn citizens to brace for the inevitable.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was at home with his wife and children. Numerous officials in charge of key regions close to the border, and mayors of cities containing strategic military targets, have told the Guardian in interviews over recent weeks that they were in bed and woke up in shock at the sound of booms, rather than having spent the final hours of peace coordinating the defence of their towns.
It is possible it would not have made a difference anyway, but as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reaches the 100-day mark some are starting to look back at the period in the buildup to the war and ask if more could have been done.
There is widespread acknowledgment, even among Zelenskiy’s fiercest political opponents, that his wartime leadership has been defiant and inspirational. But along with the praise there are also questions about those weeks before the war, in January and February.
Why did Zelenskiy remain sceptical of the increasingly alarming warnings from US intelligence that Vladimir Putin was planning a full-scale invasion? Could he have done more to prepare the country? Would it have had much effect?
“We don’t want to initiate an investigation for a while, but we cannot avoid it in the future,” said Volodymyr Ariev, an MP with the European Solidarity party of the former president Petro Poroshenko. He said his party had been pushing for weeks in the run-up to the invasion for the government to take the threat of war more seriously.
For much of January and February, the Americans were claiming privately and publicly that their intelligence showed there was a very high likelihood that Russia’s military buildup was not a bluff.
Zelenskiy, meanwhile, was impressing on the Americans that he had to balance preparations for war with concerns for the economy, and telling Ukrainians not to panic. “If everyone thinks there will be war tomorrow, the economy will be in real trouble,” a high-ranking government official said at the time.
In the first weeks of the year, Ukraine’s long-planned “territorial defence” structures were formalised, and many Ukrainians began to search for their nearest bomb shelter, as the talk of war hung in the air. But few people genuinely believed the threat was real, and many millions of Ukrainians did not make even elementary preparations for the onset of full-scale conflict and weeks of life in bomb shelters or basements. For some, this lack of planning would have terrible consequences when the war did come.
Many people were reassured by the calming messaging coming from senior Ukrainian officials. In late January Zelenskiy called the frequent US warnings of possible war a “mistake”. On 6 February his adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said the chances of resolving the crisis through negotiations were “substantially higher” than the threat of attack.
Ukrainian officials became increasingly frustrated with Washington’s public warnings of invasion. When US defence officials briefed media outlets that Russia had moved supplies of blood close to the border, seen as a sign of imminent military action, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar, categorically denied the report. “The purpose of such information is to spread panic and fear in our society,” she told the Guardian at the time.
But as February went on, US officials became more and more convinced that the Ukrainians – and some European allies – were not taking the threat seriously enough. There were frequent phone conversations between various senior officials in Washington and their counterparts in Kyiv.
On 11 February the US embassy in Kyiv called in diplomats from a large number of embassies in the city. The visitors were brought to a secure part of the embassy, small groups at a time, and handed sheets of paper on which was printed information about the likelihood and severity of Russian military action, according to three people with knowledge of the meetings. They were allowed to take notes but not to take the papers away.
Soon after, the remaining US diplomats in Kyiv were evacuated to Lviv. “It isn’t just time to leave Ukraine, it is past time to leave Ukraine,” a senior US administration official said. Several other embassies followed the Americans west.
Ukrainian intelligence was also receiving its own information, and around 17 February it got word about a number of Russian military orders that had been signed off that suggested something major was brewing. But still there was disbelief that this could mean the Americans had been right all along.
“Most people believed it would be limited to something in the Donbas and the Russians would not try the full-scale operation,” said a source close to the Ukrainian intelligence services.
Some people in the services were much more worried than others. “You could tell from what people were saying to you, and how worried they were, which foreign intelligence services they had contacts in,” said the source.
When the invasion did come, Zelenskiy and his team ignored offers from western countries to evacuate, and provided spirited leadership that helped kickstart the fierce Ukrainian defence efforts.
For now, this bravery and determination, as well as the need for unity during wartime, has prevented any backlash over possible mistakes in the buildup.
Serhiy Taruta, a businessman and MP who in 2014 was the Kyiv-appointed governor of the Donetsk region, said it was too early to raise issues about the buildup, but later a discussion would be necessary.
“Of course there are a lot of questions, the Russians were already drawing the letter Z on their equipment and everyone was saying something is coming, and our guys here were saying ‘don’t worry’. But that’s for after the war. Now is the time for the consolidation of society,” he said in an interview.
In retrospect, perhaps the best argument for why many in the Ukrainian elite did not believe the US intelligence could be accurate can be found in the dismal failure of Russia’s attempt to take the major cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv.
“It just didn’t compute,” said the source close to the intelligence services. “A takeover of Kyiv and the whole country in a few days? We thought it would be a disaster for Russia. And it was. We didn’t think Putin could be that stupid.”
