How Did the Experts Get Ukraine So Wrong?

Their early errors are still echoing through U.S. policy.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and former U.S. President Donald Trump shake hands on September 27, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Alex Kent/Getty Images)

OUT ON THE HUSTINGS OVER THE LAST TWO WEEKS, Donald Trump has been speaking about Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Here are remarks he made at a rally in North Carolina last Wednesday:

I watched this poor guy yesterday at the United Nations. He didn’t know what he was saying. They just don’t know what to do. They’re locked into a situation. It’s sad. They just don’t know what to do. Because Ukraine is gone. It’s not Ukraine anymore. You can never replace those cities and towns. And you can never replace the dead people—so many dead people. Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now. If they made a bad deal, it would have been much better. They would have given up a little bit, and everybody would be living, and every building would be built, and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years. . . . And we continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal, Zelensky. There was no deal that he could have made that wouldn’t have been better than the situation you have right now. You have a country that has been obliterated.

Let’s pull out two sentences from this appalling jumble: “Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now. If they made a bad deal, it would have been much better.”

As the intrepid Ukraine war reporter Tim Mak put it, “At its core, this is an un-American message. That it is better to live on your knees than to die on your feet. That is better to be alive and oppressed, than to fight for self-determination. To yield to the yoke without a struggle.” Or, in Patrick Henry’s ringing words from two and a half centuries earlier, “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Trump’s dark outlook for Ukraine’s wartime prospects—“Ukraine is gone”—has not emerged out of thin air. Pessimism about Ukraine’s prospects is a story with a disturbing history, one that involves not only Trump and his minions, but also completely mainstream observers of the war. As we learn from an important new study written by two distinguished students of warfare, Eliot Cohen¹ and Phillips O’Brien, and published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a deep and unwarranted pessimism about Ukraine’s future has long been thoroughly entrenched in the analytic community, with consequences that have ill served the cause of peace and freedom.

As Russia was amassing its forces on Ukraine’s frontier over the course of 2021 and early 2022, there was a widespread conviction among close observers that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be a cakewalk.

Here is a “Russian military expert” quoted in the New York Times in December 2021, just two months before the February 24, 2022 invasion: “If Russia really wants to unleash its conventional capabilities, they could inflict massive damage in a very short period of time. . . . They can devastate the Ukrainian military in the east really quickly, within the first 30–40 minutes” (emphasis added, here and in the examples below).

And here is an article by CSIS scholars, published in November 2021: “Russian military forces—including elements of the 41st Combined Field Army and 144th Guards Motorized Rifle Division . . . would likely outmatch Ukrainian conventional forces and overrun Kiev in a matter of hours if they invaded.”

And here is the Economist on January 29, 2022, just weeks before the Russian invasion: “Ukraine’s paucity of air defences and the weakness of its armed forces means that Russia could drive to Kyiv perhaps as easily as American forces reached Baghdad in the Iraq war of 2003.” That battle lasted just six days.

Cohen and O’Brien adduce many more examples. And as they record, “such assessments were believed at the top of the United States government and military. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was reported only two weeks before the invasion as saying that Kyiv could fall in 72 hours and having reported as much to members of Congress.”

But, of course, the predictions of instantaneous catastrophe all proved wildly wrong. Two and half years later, Ukraine is still fully in the fight and has managed to inflict huge casualties on Russia, more than it has suffered itself, and even, lately, to mount a counterattack and seize a chunk of Russian territory. Indeed, as Cohen and O’Brien point out, “since the summer of 2022, Ukraine has liberated far more of its territory than Russia has been able to seize in the opening months of the war.”

What accounts for the widespread misjudgment? Cohen and O’Brien identify a variety of factors, including an intense focus by analysts on the sheer numerical disparity in the size of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. This crude approach ignored other more important qualitative indicators, like the massive corruption within the supposedly modernized Russian military and the superior morale and intense motivation of Ukrainian soldiers fighting for the survival of their homeland against unprovoked aggression.

Whatever accounts for the systemic errors, the dire assessments have had an abiding influence on American policy. With Vladimir Putin possessing an “undeniable genius,” in the words of one analyst, and the supposedly overwhelming might of Russia’s modernized force pitted against the puny and antiquated Ukrainian military, the outcome of a direct confrontation between the two powers was seen as almost preordained. As Cohen and O’Brien write, “Helping a corrupt and divided Ukraine against such a mighty Russian military was . . . bound to be futile.”

This defeatist mentality had been in place for years even before the 2022 invasion and figured prominently in decisions about whether and how to arm Ukraine in the lower-intensity war that had been raging ever since 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and part of the Donbas. Providing Ukraine with anti-tank weapons or air defense missiles was dismissed by analysts as insufficient to tilt the skewed military balance between the two warring countries, and hence “pointless.”

The same defeatist mindset continues to echo to this day. It is expressed in America’s self-deterrence, the consistently overwrought anxiety over provoking the ten-foot-tall and “genius” Putin into some sort of dangerous aggressive response—possibly nuclear—to our providing Ukraine with more powerful and longer-range weapons. But as the CSIS report makes plain, the fears have been misplaced.

In reality, Putin was unlikely to escalate the war in Ukraine to the nuclear level precisely because that could have provoked NATO to intervene. Russia would have lacked the strength to match NATO in a conventional conflict if that happened. The possibility of “vertical escalation” was further reduced by China’s warning to Russia that it would not tolerate the use of nuclear weapons, an approach fully consonant with China’s own policy of no first use.

President Joe Biden has been masterful in marshaling a great coalition of countries to aid Ukraine, but he has proved far less masterful—in fact, delinquent—in providing Ukraine with effective armaments in a timely fashion. Trump, of course, presents another category of failure entirely. If he is re-elected president, his predictions of Ukrainian doom will, thanks to his pro-Putin tilt, rapidly become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In reading through Cohen and O’Brien’s fascinating study, with its meticulous assemblage of faulty analyses constructed out of shoddy methodologies by so many leading specialists, one is left with the distinct impression that rarely have so many got things so wrong with such great certainty and to such damaging effect. With Ukraine’s survival still hanging in the balance, lessons need to be learned—urgently.

1. Full disclosure: Eliot Cohen is also a cohost of “Shield of the Republic,” a Bulwark podcast.