Right up to the moment when President Vladimir Putin ordered his invasion of Ukraine, many Russia experts and analysts did not believe he would pull the trigger. Some, such as the Russian journalist and critic Yulia Latynina, argued that Putin was bluffing and would most likely back down at the first sign of real conflict. Others, including Hans Petter Midttun, a former Norwegian defense attaché in Ukraine; Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Alina Frolova, Oleksiy Pavliuchyk, and Viktor Kevlyuk of the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies; and several current and former Ukrainian officials, predicted that Moscow would opt to escalate the hybrid political and military warfare it has waged in eastern Ukraine for the last eight years rather than risk an all-out military assault. Nearly everyone who misread Putin’s intentions believed that the Russian president viewed the risks to Russia and to himself of a full-scale invasion as greater than the potential rewards. They assumed he would opt for cyberattacks, proxy warfare, and other more covert and deniable means.
Such assumptions had become so rooted in the prevailing view of Russia that it was easy to forget even these so-called gray zone techniques once seemed reckless and inconsistent with Putin’s apparent appetite for risk. The world has grown to expect Russian covert influence operations almost everywhere, for instance. But when Kremlin-backed hackers interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, their actions struck many in the West as almost inconceivably brazen. I have been similarly surprised by Putin’s actions. After protesters toppled the Kremlin-friendly government in Kyiv in 2014, I assumed Putin would not overreact. Russia had deep enough political, economic, and sociocultural ties to Ukraine that he could afford to play the long game there, I reasoned. After all, that is what he did after Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, which had posed a similar threat to Russia’s sway over the country. But Putin confounded me and many other analysts with his willingness to use Russian forces covertly to seize Ukrainian territory.
