Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine

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Yellen didn’t feel like she had enough time to think about it and the potential effects, so we broke without a full decision, but after more conversations, including having [Italian] Prime Minister [Mario] Draghi express his view, we convinced Secretary Yellen that this was the right thing to do. There was no time to waste. Then we were going, “Let’s go get the U.K., Canada, Japan, and anybody else that we can secure before 5 p.m. Eastern.” This is getting late in the day for Europe — they wanted to get this thing out — but Japan was sleeping, so I had to wake up the sherpa who was trying to get the prime minister on the phone. It wasn’t really enough time. I had to apologize profusely and explain you can just join this in the morning, which they did.

WALLY ADEYEMO: We started high and we stayed high. We immobilized their assets, which meant that their assets now were going to be trapped around the world, and they couldn’t use them by bringing them back to Russia and using them to buy things in other countries.

JON FINER: The export controls that we impose on Russia, they don’t get as much attention but in terms of being able to actually inhibit the development of the Russian military over the medium and long term, controlling their access to advanced technologies, like semiconductors is going to be as significant as almost anything else we’ve done.

The collective sanctions imposed on Russia had a massive negative effect on its economy. "It was a much bigger, more comprehensive sanctions package than I think he ever could have imagined happening," Liz Truss said. | Konstantin Zavrazhin/Getty Images, Francisco Ubilla/AP Photo, Alexander Sayganov/Sipa USA via AP, and Sean Gallup/Getty Images

DALEEP SINGH: I remember Jake was like, “Is this going to work?“ I said, “Well, let’s just wait for New Zealand.” New Zealand is the first currency market on Sundays — that’s the start of the weekend global markets. I fully expected a catastrophic open for the Russian ruble, because no major central bank had ever been sanctioned in this way. Everyone with rubles is going to try to get out all at once. I started to worry a little bit about almost too much catastrophic success — could this be too much of a bad thing?

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: The ruble cratered.

LIZ TRUSS: We’ve seen the Russian economy pushed back decades by the effect of those sanctions.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH: I’ve learned a lot about the power of unity — globally, in terms of standing up for a rules-based order, standing up for Article Five, the unity of NATO.

WALLY ADEYEMO: What happened almost immediately was a number of private sector firms were calling and telling us that in response to stakeholder pressure they were thinking about pulling out of Russia. We saw almost immediately a number of companies start sanctioning themselves — that was also having a huge impact in terms of the Russian economy. We started to see an accelerated movement of not only foreign capital but Russian capital out of Russia because everybody knew the situation was just going to get worse over time.

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: The luxury stores all closed almost immediately [in Moscow]. The Lamborghini dealership, the Gucci stores, etc., they left the lights on, and put discreet notes on their front door saying, “Temporarily Closed.” Moscow was surreal — everything was peaceful and quiet at the embassy.

“Moscow was surreal—everything was peaceful and quiet at the embassy.”

—AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN

LISA MONACO, deputy attorney general, Department of Justice: We stood up what we called Task Force KleptoCapture nine days after the invasion to enforce these sanctions in a major way. As we saw it, sanctions are only as effective as their enforcement, so we wanted to make sure we had an unprecedented enforcement mechanism to accompany the unprecedented sanctions that Wally, Daleep, their teams, and others across the government had helped rally the world around. We joked Wally was “freeze” and we were “seize.”

But to us, this task force was also about exposing the stunning corruption that Putin has used to solidify and hold power and that has enabled his brutal war machine. We focused right away on oligarchs to expose the corruption and to do everything we could to go after their ill-gotten gains — whether in bank accounts here or in the form of planes or yachts, you name it — and to say that there’s no place that they can hide. This was a new way of doing business for us. I now get a daily intelligence report about where these oligarchs’ assets are and how we’re going after them.

ANNE NEUBERGER: DDoS attacks occurred against Ukrainian government systems, and because we were so concerned this was larger — an attempt to destabilize, demoralize Ukraine — we worked to rapidly have them deploy DDoS protections, and also attribute the attacks publicly [to Russia] in two to three days, which we never do. I went to the podium [in the White House press briefing room] to convey the message that as the President has said, “Any disruptive attacks would be taken seriously.” We worked very closely with our European partners, as well, to attribute [to Russia] the first destructive attack that was done, the Viasat attack .

TOM SULLIVAN: The next two weeks are a total blur.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH: I don’t remember a single day that actually stands out.

JAMES HOPE: One giant blur of phone calls and meetings and tracking down people.

VICTORIA NULAND: There were about eight nights where I had less than four hours sleep.

TOM SULLIVAN: My wife works in government as well, and we were talking about this on a regular basis — trying to explain to the two older kids, who were six and three, what we were trying to do. We were traveling around, I was working such long hours, my wife was trying to explain when they would say, “Why isn’t daddy home?” First it was: “They’re trying to stop Russia from invading Ukraine.” Then it was: “They’re helping Ukraine stand up to Russia’s invasion.” The kids started to learn about Kyiv and places like that — in a way it was endearing, at the same time, it was horrifying that this is how they have to learn about things like this.

DALEEP SINGH: My wife got used to me working out of our bed from 3 to about 6 a.m., and then I would have a peaceful drive to work along the Potomac, and then back at it until usually 11 o’clock or midnight.

JAMES HOPE: The main comment from my wife was, “I guess we’re not going to see you for a few weeks.” I said, “Yeah, that’s probably true.”

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: I moved out of [the ambassador’s residence] Spaso House. After the 24th, I moved a bunch of my clothes into a townhouse on the embassy compound. From that day, until I left as ambassador later in the year, I lived on the compound. President Biden made it clear to me he wanted to keep our embassy open.

LAURA COOPER: We had a lot of ramen noodles. We had this folding table set-up in our lobby reception area [in our Pentagon suite] — one of the other teams sent out this sign-up sheet for people to bring us food. We would have dinner deliveries, breakfast deliveries. It was really a beautiful thing. We had some aficionados at the Eden Center [a Northern Virginia center of Vietnamese culture], who bought massive containers of authentic ramen noodles that fed us at all hours of the night.

XI: THE RUSSIANS FALTER

‘PUTIN MISCALCULATED’​

DAYS AFTER THE INVASION​

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: When we saw that thrust south from Belarus, the amount of equipment and the number of personnel who are heading south — it’s not that far to Kyiv — I thought, “Boy, it’s blitzkrieg. They’re going to be in Kyiv.”

LAURA COOPER: We were watching so closely to see what the signs of damage would be. One of our biggest concerns was that Russia could take out Ukrainian air defenses in those opening moments of the war, and Russia could have gained air superiority. There was certainly this realization that built over that day that the Russian strikes were not that effective — certainly there was damage, but not nearly on a scale that one might have expected. That was a big realization that the Ukrainians would be able to withstand a lot, actually, right off the bat.

VICTORIA NULAND: There were many things we were expecting that actually didn’t happen: Massive cyberattack across Ukraine that debilitated their ability to respond; a far more effective Russian move off the airport outside of Kyiv into the city. None of us expected the Ukrainians to be able to withstand as strongly as they did in those first four or five days.

DEREK CHOLLET: We learned a lot about the character and courage of leaders like Zelenskyy, who unquestionably rose to the moment in ways that are inspiring, frankly — and not just the president, but the Ukrainian leadership and the Ukrainian people.

Zelenskyy addressed Congress on March 16, 2022. "I don’t know that we could have predicted what extraordinary leadership he would give during the war," said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif). | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: Particularly after seeing how the Afghan military melted away in the face of the Taliban, we had a lot of skepticism about how well we could identify the will to fight.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH: That’s one of those things that until a country goes through something like this, you’ll just never know.

 

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LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: The notion of will to fight and analyzing the will of fight is a dynamic thing. It is not a static thing. If you looked at the capability and capacity of the “New Look” Russian army, and at the capability and capacity of the Ukrainian military as we saw it at the time, we thought it would go very badly and very quickly for the Ukrainians. Actually, they did pretty well.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: Zelenskyy was a master — and still is a master — of the airwaves, creating a narrative, maintaining societal cohesion, motivating and inspiring not only his society, but the world.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: That was another miscalculation on Putin’s part — he thought Zelenskyy would be a weak leader or flee the country. I don’t know that we could have predicted what extraordinary leadership he would give during the war. I don’t know that anyone who hasn’t faced that kind of situation knows exactly how they’ll perform, but he is brilliant.

JAMES HOPE: The most unique thing about this whole response and experience is that the government of Ukraine and non-government part of Ukraine — private sector, civil society — never lost their resilience, never lost their capacity, never lost their passion for engaging and responding to war breaking out.

BILL BURNS: Our analysts here never underestimated the sense of Ukrainian determination — this was their territory and they were going to defend it — what I think it’s probably fair to say is that we did not understand clearly enough how ineffective the Russian military was going to be.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: It is certainly fair to say that the U.S. miscalculated the Russian’s military capability — perhaps only somewhat less than Putin miscalculated his own military capability.

CELESTE WALLANDER: They were much less capable, the plan was much less coherent, there was much more dysfunction in the Russian military than was apparent in their exercises. The Russians were overconfident based on how easy it had been for them to intervene in Syria, and in fact that was not a good test of their capabilities.

“They were much less capable, the plan was much less coherent, there was much more dysfunction in the Russian military than was apparent in their exercises.”​

—CELESTE WALLANDER​

GEN. MARK MILLEY: The Russians thought that they had an effective competent army to execute combined arms maneuver, which is a very specific thing. The United States military does that very well, a few other militaries. What that means is they could coordinate and synchronize dismounted infantry with mounted infantry, mechanized infantry with armored tanks, with mortars, artillery, close air support, electronic warfare engineers, medical sustainment — you bring it all together in time and space to achieve your desired effect. As it turned out, they couldn’t do it. They stumbled around and they couldn’t pull it together.

LAURA COOPER: We were all looking at the situation incredibly closely, looking for signs that the Ukrainians were able to repel those early attacks. We were watching to see, “Can the Ukrainians hold on to the airfields?” When we saw Hostomel airfield, in particular, when we saw that Russia wasn’t able to just come in and take it — the Ukrainians were fighting fiercely, resisting, and the Russians were unable to land their reinforcements — that was a real turning point.

VICTORIA NULAND: All of a sudden, we realized that Ukraine — and particularly the government, the leadership, the capital — might be able to resist.

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: All of those turned my thinking that, “Hey, these guys are in it to win it and they are going to fight hard.” Probably within a week our thinking has changed radically on that.

LAURA COOPER: What we grew to realize in the coming days, as we saw the Ukrainians responding, was just how capable the Ukrainian air defenders had been in those early moments, and just how capable they had been in defending their cities and their forces.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: The Russians have never achieved air superiority. Because they haven’t achieved air superiority, they didn’t have close air support for the ground forces. Another thing that they didn’t do — which everyone thought they would do — is effectively use electronic warfare, jamming, shutting down the electronic spectrum. We don’t really know yet why they didn’t. One thing could be that the Russian radios and the Ukrainian radios were essentially the same old Soviet-era model radios, using the same spectrum, same frequency band. So if you shut down the Ukrainian radios, then you might be shutting down your own radio?

Another reason might be that the Russians anticipated taking over the commercial air waves — the television stations, the radio stations — in order to put out their propaganda. The Russian special forces and intelligence services are specifically tasked to do that, and they failed. They have a lot of special operations forces, and usually we think they’re pretty well trained, but their special operations forces did not, as best I can tell, play a significant role in Russian operations. Everybody thought that they would be much more effective. Their paratroopers, assault forces, were not nearly as effective as we would have thought.

AVRIL HAINES: They expected the Ukrainians to welcome them in some respects; they were planning for a different fight than they actually ended up in.

JOHN KIRBY: We were surprised to see that in just basic military operations, the Russians did not seem to have a good plan. It was almost like they were fighting a war in small silos.

BILL BURNS: There were fairly senior Russian military leaders we could see in intelligence who were just trying to catch up with the decision to invade, even as it was flowing. Commanders of units didn’t really understand what their goals were.

The Russian military operation was much less effective than U.S. intelligence initially anticipated, allowing Ukraine to resist attacks and maintain control over territory. | Rodrigo Abd and Marienko Andrew/AP Photos

GEN. MARK MILLEY: In the Russian system, it’s very top down — centralized command and control. The Ukrainians were brought up under the Soviet system, so they had the same system — top down — but in 2014, we go in there and start training them after the invasion of Crimea. The western method — what America calls mission command — essentially says that you authorize and delegate authority to conduct military activity or operations to the lowest level at which it can be successfully executed. You empower junior officers and junior noncommissioned officers to execute tactical operations. A battlefield is a very dynamic thing, and they’re going to respond to the exigencies of a battlefield at the time. You need to empower them to make the right decisions. It makes for a very decentralized method of command that is very effective in combat because warfare is a very dynamic environment filled with chaos, confusion and fear.

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: They don’t have a great NCO [noncommissioned officer] corps like we do — that’s the backbone, our noncommissioned officers — and they don’t do free play exercises that allow them to learn and grow. They’re very scripted.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: What is the result on the actual battlefield here in Ukraine? The result is you’ll get a Russian battalion with several companies and platoons going down the road in a singular column, they’ll get attacked, and let’s say the battalion commander gets killed or wounded. The others will not know what to do at that point. They’re paralyzed. They’re just sitting ducks. You saw it on videos, where they sat there on roads, and they just got pummeled by the Ukrainians.

AVRIL HAINES: They ran out of gas and had a pileup on one of their axes into Ukraine, and I remember Lloyd [Austin] saying, “That is the kind of logistics problem that you cannot solve in hours or days.”

 

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AMANDA SLOAT: If you need a tangible image of things not going well, it’s when the tanks that were supposed to be rolling into Kyiv within three days and taking over the city are stuck in a traffic jam on the highway and not moving.

JOHN KIRBY: We began to pick up signs that soldiers were complaining about running out of food, not being able to eat, and running out of ammunition.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: We knew they would struggle with [logistics] because they have a very poor track record of doing it. They did not evacuate casualties — they had a very high died-of-wounds ratio. They did not effectively evacuate broken vehicles in order to repair them; they just left them on the battlefield. They didn’t adequately resupply their forces with ammunition, water and food. Their logistics system has proven to be very poor, and they never adequately fixed it.

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: Some of the calamities that befell the Russian military people just have forgotten about — they had their troops digging trenches in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, digging up irradiated soil and poisoning their own people; their flagship for the Black Sea, the Moskva, was sunk by Ukrainian missiles; the number of general officers using cell phones and getting blown up. It was pretty catastrophic and shambolic.

An image from social media showed the Russian ship, the Moskva, after being struck by Ukrainian missiles in the Black Sea on April 14 2022.

DEREK CHOLLET: It’s always shocking to see that Putin seems to have no limits in what he seems to be willing to do — the brutality with which the campaign’s been conducted, the willingness he’s shown to see his own troops chewed up, the delusions he’s operating under, the whole justification of de-Nazifying Ukraine. It’s not surprising because in many ways we’ve seen this before, but it’s always shocking.

AMB. MICHAEL CARPENTER: Eight, nine days after the start of the war, I proceeded to lay out [at the OSCE Permanent Council] that we had credible information Russia would create a system of camps and that it would resort to repression, mistreatment and human rights abuses to carry out its aims in the territories that it occupied. Essentially, we were previewing what we thought would happen, which is exactly what did happen: Russia set up this system of filtration camps to distinguish between loyal Russian subjects and those who felt they wanted to remain loyal to the Ukrainian nation state. It was chilling — the implications were those of abuse, torture, mistreatment, potentially killing of Ukrainian civilians. I remember writing the statement and then rewriting it to make it even stronger to make the strongest possible case. I knew that I had the attention of my European colleagues; I knew that we had built up a lot of credibility. I knew that people would be paying attention to what I had to say, and I wanted it to be unambiguous.

DAME KAREN PIERCE: There’d been a hope that the Russians wouldn’t behave like that, and then that was just shot to pieces.

LIZ TRUSS: Some of the appalling atrocities that took place, such as the use of sexual violence — we spent quite a lot of time, making sure that we had British experts going out there to help collect evidence, as well as dealing with the immediate help the Ukrainians needed.

BILL BURNS: The Russians were responsible for some incredible brutalities in Bucha and elsewhere, but the Ukrainians, once they weathered that first blow, their sense of determination picked up.

DAME KAREN PIERCE: People did start thinking about Taiwan quite early, thinking it’s very important we get this right because the Chinese will be watching.

“People did start thinking about Taiwan quite early, thinking it’s very important we get this right because the Chinese will be watching.”

—DAME KAREN PIERCE

CELESTE WALLANDER: A big focus of that first month in those meetings was making sure we kept the [supply] pipelines open. We saw the Ukrainians effectively using the Stingers, effectively using the Javelins. That’s when we started getting in this battle rhythm of regular resupplies that the Ukrainians needed in real time.

JAMES HOPE: We immediately started sending in security gear, like vests and helmets and medical kits for journalists, so that they could do their job — get out and keep reporting on the war on the front lines. We made sure local communities had first responder capacity — simple things for their emergency service responders, flashlights, med kits, everything that you might need as a first responder in a crisis. All those kinds of items — along with all the humanitarian assistance — began to flow immediately.

COLIN KAHL: Sometimes people say, “Well, if you were going to give them this stuff, why didn’t you give them all at the beginning?” And the reality is, as a matter of dollars and logistics, we couldn’t. We’ve given $27 billion of security assistance. We didn’t have $27 billion at the beginning of the war. As a matter of actual and bureaucratic physics, you have to prioritize. What the secretary has been ruthless about is, “What does Ukraine need right now for the fight?” In the initial phases of the conflict, that was anti-armor, man-portable and short-range air defense systems, and artillery and ammunition for their Soviet legacy systems, and more Soviet legacy air defense systems. We poured in the Javelins and the Stingers and scoured our own stocks from the Cold War for Soviet era ammunition and stuff we swept up around the globe.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: Because of the nature of the Russian attack, it was essentially three categories of weaponry they needed immediately. The first was anti-armor munitions, anti-armor systems, because 200,000 Russians are attacking in mobile combined arms — mechanized infantry, and tank units. Second thing you got to do is keep the Russian Air Force at bay — hence, air defenses — and the third thing you have to do is fire artillery — basic artillery and mortars, nothing fancy. We started flowing in enormous numbers of anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, MANPADs , Stingers and others. That’s what they asked for. That’s what they wanted right away. That’s what we gave them.

COLIN KAHL: Even as we were providing thousands of anti-armor and MANPADS and doing everything else, so were the Brits, the Poles, the Baltic states and other countries from all over the world.

LIZ TRUSS: We were talking about everything — it could be a specific piece of ammunition that was required, it could be a sanction that they thought would be effective. We worked very, very closely with Ukrainians throughout. They’re the people on the front line, the people who are in the life and death situation every day.

COLIN KAHL: That assistance enabled the Ukrainians to win the Battle of Kyiv.

VICTORIA NULAND: Week one, week two, week three, we began to become more optimistic that if we helped Ukraine as much as we possibly could, that the country might survive.

LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Russia, Putin did not expect the response that they got — the isolation that they got. We really were successful in isolating them.

CONCLUSION: COLLECTIVE RESOLVE

‘A LONG, GRINDING FIGHT’​

MARCH 2022 TO TODAY​

JON FINER: The salience and unity of the NATO alliance is beyond where it has been in many decades — if not ever — and in the United States, there is division on almost everything, a 50-50 country, we have maintained a degree of support in our politics and in the public for this effort to support Ukrainians that I think has surprised many people.

DALEEP SINGH: We mustered the collective resolve of the U.S. and our closest allies and partners in ways that surprised almost everyone.

BILL BURNS: It’s the way government should work, in my opinion. The president set a very clear sense of direction. There was a shared understanding of the problem and coordination amongst the principals. Broadly speaking, the U.S. government performed the way it should perform in a situation like that.

 

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VICTORIA NULAND: It has been an enormous interagency effort, but it’s also taught a whole new generation of American diplomats what it takes to rally global support in defense of democracy, what it feels like to be part of an endeavor that is absolutely existential for the world that they are going to live in going forward.

AVRIL HAINES: [The war] was not something that would be easily ended. We were in for a long, grinding fight.

Digging graves and carrying coffins have been commons sights throughout Ukraine during the past year. | John Moore and Sean Gallup/Getty Images

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: It has become this protracted gridlock — the race for resources, who can acquire more materiel and enough ammunition and enough soldiers who are trained.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: People don’t think about war — even today. When I say to people, “There have been 35,000 or 40,000 innocent Ukrainians killed in this war, a third of their economy has been destroyed, an estimated 7 million internally-displaced persons, and another 7 million refugees out of a pre-war population of 45 million — you’re looking at 30 to 40 percent of that country displaced out of houses.” People sit there and go: “Oh?”

Tip O’Neill — I’m from Boston, he was a Boston guy — and he said all politics are local. If it’s not happening to you, or in and around you, there’s a sense of remoteness. It doesn’t strike through the same way it does if it happens to you and your family. But for some of us, who have a lot of combat experience, who have seen a lot of war, it’s very real. For many people — good people, smart people — it’s very difficult to get your head around this stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s human nature. Just the other day, there were 1,100 Russians killed in a single day — more than that, closer to 1,200 — down around Bakhmut. That’s Iwo Jima, that’s Shiloh.

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: The Russian army in history is a learning army. They don’t seem to be learning a lot of lessons — or maybe it’s too hard to put into practice the lessons they are learning. In World War II, they actually got better as the war went on. We don’t see them applying those lessons to a great degree inside the conflict today. It will take them years to rebuild their military no matter how this turns out.

Zelenskyy addresses a joint session of Congress in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 21, 2022. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

AVRIL HAINES: One of the challenges for me, frankly, since the invasion is having to read the intelligence every day. It’s brutal. It’s absolutely brutal. This senseless war and how it’s affected people’s lives in every possible respect is deeply depressing.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: One thing that was — and still is — on my mind every day is escalation management. Russia is a nuclear-armed state. They have the capability to destroy humanity. That’s nothing to play with. We’re a big power. Russia is a big power. There’s a lot at stake here, a lot of people’s lives. Every move has to be consciously and deliberately thought through to its logical extension.

JON FINER: This war may well go on for a lot longer, but already Russia has suffered enormous costs on the battlefield and financially — their position in the world, their status, their standing, their stature has eroded significantly from where it was for February of 2022.

AMANDA SLOAT: The president has long wanted to go to Ukraine. When it became safe for Zelenskyy to make it out of the country and he visited Washington, that made the president that much more interested to be able to go himself.

Biden meets with Zelenskyy at Mariinsky Palace during an unannounced visit in Kyiv, Ukraine on Feb. 20, 2023. | Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP

JOHN KIRBY, now coordinator for strategic communications, National Security Council, White House: The president felt that it was very important to go around the date of the anniversary to make clear that though, it’s a sad anniversary one year of war, the United States was going to stay with Ukraine for as long as it takes.

JOE BIDEN, president of the United States, speaking Monday, Feb. 20, 2023, during his surprise trip to Ukraine: One year later, Kyiv stands. And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands.

FILED UNDER:

ORAL HISTORY ,

UKRAINE ,

RUSSIA’S WAR ON UKRAINE ,

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National security adviser Jake Sullivan speaks during the daily White House press briefing on Feb. 11, 2022. Sullivan's appearance was part of a larger public strategy to stay ahead of Russia and keep everyone prepared for when the invasion did begin. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: From February 11th, I’m seeing an intense amount of action starting.

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE: 11th of February, I stood up our task force at NSA and Cyber Command, 24 by 7, because we knew that the invasion was coming soon.

DEREK CHOLLET: The president called Putin, the Secretary called Lavrov, the president called Zelenskyy. There’s a series of actions to try to make one last attempt to delay — perhaps avoid — this would seem-to-be imminent invasion. Of course, things got pushed to the right by about a week or so.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: I know that was a huge lot of diplomacy. There’s a lot of effort being done by Secretary Austin, Secretary Blinken, Jake Sullivan, myself, the president himself, to try to dissuade Russia from doing this and to warn them if they did it these will be likely consequences.

DEREK CHOLLET: There have been multiple attempts — not just by us. There were other countries, the French, the Germans, others were engaging Putin. No one was getting anywhere.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: We did have intense conversations with the Russians. I would corner [Russian ambassador to the UN] Vasily [Nebenzya] and say, “This is unacceptable.” In the Security Council, we yell at each other and point fingers of blame at each other. I tried to reason with him. What I came to understand is he didn’t know what was going on. He was using his talking points from Moscow.

“We did have intense conversations with the Russians. I would corner [Russian ambassador to the UN] Vassily [Nebenzia] and say, ‘This is unacceptable.’”​

 

[bnew]

—LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD​

GEN. MARK MILLEY: I called up my counterpart in Russia a couple of different times. He just said that they were doing an exercise, and I confronted him on it. I talked to him as late as maybe two weeks before the actual invasion, I said, “This is a terrible strategic mistake. It’s placing Europe at risk. It’s obviously going to have tragic consequences for Ukraine. This is going to be an extremely bloody affair for Russia. This is an enormous strategic mistake that you’re making.” I think I said, “You’ll get in there in 14 days, you won’t get out for 14 years, and you will have body bags flowing back to Moscow the entire time. These people are going to fight you.” The demographic of present-day Ukraine is that anybody who’s 60 years or younger knows nothing but freedom for the most part, and a country like that is not easily conquered.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: My staff put a ton of calls and WhatsApp messages for me to send out, sharing with countries what we were concerned about and asking them to support us. I always approach asking for votes with genuine respect: “I understand your position, but here’s our position. We don’t understand why you want to abstain. There’s no neutrality here. How can you be neutral when you see what the Russians are doing?” Strong, but respectful.

LIZ TRUSS: It’s phone calls, WhatsApps, meetings. There were a whole series of meetings to persuade anybody who wasn’t on board. The Baltic states and Poland were always incredibly strong on this, because they knew exactly what the threat was — they know if Putin is successful in Ukraine, it won’t be the end of it. They were very, very powerful advocates.

JAKE SULLIVAN: Those were sleepless months. I ate like basically a college sophomore during that stretch — the master of chicken fingers and french fries.

DEREK CHOLLET: On the evening of February 16, [Secretary Blinken] had been on the eighth floor [of the Department of State] at a small meeting with some outside experts, former officials, about the strategic impact of a possible war — thinking through if what we feared was going to happen happens, what would that mean for our broader strategy? Bob Zoellick, Tom Donilon, and others in a small group. During that meeting, the idea began to percolate that the secretary the very next morning, on his way to Munich, should fly to New York to address the Security Council at a previously scheduled meeting on the crisis in Ukraine.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: I thought it was really important that the secretary come.

DEREK CHOLLET: The decision was taken probably about 8:30 that night that he would go to New York, and work started on the statement for the next morning.

ANTONY BLINKEN: We saw this — I saw this — as maybe one final potential opportunity, unlikely as it might be, to avert war, and to preview for the world what we thought was now inevitable. We made a decision on the dime to go to New York.

DEREK CHOLLET: It was just 19 years earlier, at around the same time [of the year] that Colin Powell had appeared before that historic horseshoe-shaped table at the UN Security Council to give a speech about the threat that Iraq posed that all turned out to be wrong.

MATTHEW MILLER: No one working on this was naive to how the world works, and we understand the press is right to be skeptical about claims they hear from the government that they can’t verify, but we couldn’t understand what the supposed nefarious motives that we were trying to pursue could possibly be? If we’re making up intelligence, to what end? What is our goal here? We’re not trying to take part of Russia. We’re not trying to start a war with Russia so we can get territory from them. We don’t have any goal here other than to stop a war. It did seem a very easy way of differentiating this situation with the buildup to the Iraq war.

DEREK CHOLLET: We were there to make a case to try to prevent a war from happening, not making a case to justify a war.

“That was a stark moment in which it became increasingly clear to people around the world that Russia was really going to do it.”​

–ANTONY BLINKEN​

ANTONY BLINKEN: We worked overnight. We were working out what I’d say until pretty much the moment we arrived at the United Nations. What we wanted to focus on was to describe in great detail what we anticipated would happen over the coming days — particularly the Russians doing these false-flag operations to lay the groundwork for the invasion.

After I ran through that, there was a moment at the end where I thought it was important to really, once and for all, in front of the entire world — represented at the Security Council — put the Russian representative on the spot with a very simple question: Can you say unequivocally that Russia will not invade? You can announce today, with no qualifications, no equivocations, no deflections, that you will not invade Ukraine. Not that you do not ‘intend’ to invade Ukraine, not that you don’t have any ‘plans’ to invade Ukraine, but that you ‘won’t’ invade Ukraine. You can state it clearly to the entire world. Then you can demonstrate you mean it by sending your troops, your tanks, your planes back to their barracks and send your diplomats to the negotiating table.

Of course, the representative could not, or would not, make that commitment. That was a stark moment in which it became increasingly clear to people around the world that Russia was really going to do it.

Blinken, with U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield seated behind him, addresses the UN Security Council in New York City on Feb. 17, 2022. "We saw this—I saw this—as maybe one final potential opportunity, unlikely as it might be to, to avert war," Blinken said. | Richard Drew/AP Photo

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Tony laid it out in stark detail.

LAURA COOPER: On February 16th and the 17th, I accompany Secretary Austin to the NATO defense ministerial — it was just this incredible moment. It almost gives me chills to think back to sitting in that room of the North Atlantic Council, hearing the ministers of defense as they went around, all calling on support for deterrence and defense, support to look at establishing new NATO battle groups in Central and Eastern Europe and southeastern Europe. You had France stand up and volunteer to lead a battle group in Romania. Seeing this groundswell of support was such an incredible moment, because we had had so many consultations with allies where they were still trying to absorb, What did this intelligence really mean? Would this really happen? The fact that they were prepared to stand up and take action, even in advance of the invasion, was this tremendous moment of encouragement.

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE: The 17th of February, I fly home for a speech in my hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, and it’s been really cold — if you’ve ever been in Minnesota, February is a cold month — and the chair calls me about 5:30 at night, Central Time. It’s a pretty sensitive call, so I asked my colleagues, “Hey, can you just step out of the car for a second so I can talk to the chair?” My guys later tell me, “So it is the coldest day of the year, and we’re wondering how long the chairman’s going to talk to you.” The chair’s like, “OK, so just one more time — what do you think?“ I said, “It’s coming soon, chairman. I know it.” He says, “Yep. I believe it as well.” This is just this confidence that we have collectively on the 17th of February.

VII. THE MILITARY CALCULATION

‘IT WAS GOING TO BE MESSY AND UGLY AND HORRIFIC’​

MID-FEBRUARY​

ANTONY BLINKEN: The invasion didn’t take place for another week, precisely because we were able to call Putin out publicly. The fact that we were able to continue to declassify information, call him out at the Security Council, have the president use the ultimate bully pulpit to call him out — that put them a little bit off the timeline that we had seen.

JOHN KIRBY: From the very beginning of this thing, they weaponized energy, they weaponized food, but they also tried to weaponize information, and we have been very agile and very nimble in the information space in trying to take away their ability to do that.

DEREK CHOLLET: I think we got inside his head.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: This thing was on again, off again for a good 30 days, because these indicators are clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking.

JON FINER: To be honest, I’m not sure that Russian leaders had an exact date in mind.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: It’s going to happen, but we just can’t tell you the hour. Everyone’s on the balls of their feet.

“It’s going to happen, but we just can’t tell you the hour. Everyone’s on the balls of their feet.”​

—GEN. MARK MILLEY​

 

[bnew]

COLIN KAHL: We had pretty good visibility into what the Russians were planning — in fact, probably better than some of the Russian generals and certainly most of the soldiers who carried out that mission.

BILL BURNS: It’s our impression that the basic decision to invade and a lot of the planning was in a circle of probably no more than three or four people around Putin.

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: There were a couple of instances where we saw a potential false-flag operation by the Russian government — some car bombs that went off outside local government offices in the Donbas. There was more than one of those instances where we exposed in advance what was going to be a Russian provocation, and may have influenced it.

Debris from a blown up car is seen in Donetsk, Ukraine on Feb. 18, 2022, after violence escalated in the territory controlled by pro-Russian militants. | AP Photo

JOHN KIRBY: We had information that the Russians were going to claim that the Ukrainians were staging some sort of radioactive event, which of course wasn’t true. We’re not 100 percent sure that [exposing that] was the reason it never happened, but it may have contributed to no such action being taken by the Russians — again, difficult to prove a negative.

JAMES HOPE: The days definitely ran together. You just worked all day and all night and try to get home to take a shower, get a change of clothes, and then back to the fight.

MATTHEW MILLER: The [White House] Mess doesn’t change its hours for anyone. You were very cognizant of when the dinner hours closed. Obviously, you can’t order for delivery to the White House. You usually had to get French fries and a hotdog from the Mess before it closed at 7:45 or 8, otherwise you’d eat when you got home late at night.

JAKE SULLIVAN: This was uncharted territory — the idea that there would be a major land war in Europe, with all of the ripple effects that that could cause, that felt like an enormous weight on me, on the whole team, most especially on the president. It was extremely hard to sleep.

DEREK CHOLLET: The problem is in this line of work what we do is we worry. Every day I get a briefing book that’s full of bad news.

JAKE SULLIVAN: The intelligence community’s analysis was that Russia would achieve substantial gains on the ground very rapidly. Kyiv could easily fall fast. It wasn’t just the pressure of a war starting. It was the pressure of Russia, brutally, ruthlessly succeeding. A lot of our planning was worst-case scenario planning, which always psychologically puts one in a tough space because you’re just constantly thinking about the worst things that can happen.

“The intelligence community’s analysis was that Russia would achieve substantial gains on the ground very rapidly. Kyiv could easily fall fast.”

—JAKE SULLIVAN

GEN. MARK MILLEY: This is a very large conventional force — 100,000, 200,000, or so, arrayed in multiple field armies that were going to attack along multiple avenues of approach from Russia into Ukraine.

They intended to achieve success within about six weeks. We think that’s what they intended to do — to topple the government, seize the capital, kill or capture Zelenskyy in a few days, and then to get to the Dnieper River in force within about six weeks. All that done prior to the May Day Parade, to declare victory for the so-called special military operation. This was a large-scale, conventional invasion that involved a tremendous amount of special operations forces and FSB [Russian intelligence] as well, in order to do special missions throughout Ukraine. It was a heavy air component, missiles, etc., electronic warfare and cyber — all of that put together into this large-scale invasion. We saw all that coming together.

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: My own perception was that the Russians were confident; the Russian military had invested billions in their military over the prior 10 or 12 years, and that this “special military operation” was going to do exactly what President Putin wanted in Ukraine. It would be a catastrophe for Ukraine, the Ukrainians and the Zelenskyy government. It was going to be messy and ugly and horrific. I was pretty confident that Russians were going to capture a lot of territory, including Kyiv. The Russian nationalists, the propagandists, and Russian media, were saying, “Well, we’re looking forward to the big May 9 Victory Day parade in Kyiv this year.”

GEN. MARK MILLEY: As we got closer, a couple of weeks out, a lot of people were in denial — one of them we had to convince was Ukraine themselves. Denial is probably the wrong word — they have been dealing with Russia, their neighbor, their whole lives, a lot of these guys were trained by Russians, they’ve been fighting the Russians since 2014. They said, “They’re not going to invade.” I attribute that to a couple of things: One is the normal human tendency to deny tragedy, to deny catastrophe — that was quite prevalent — and another is they did not want to panic their public, and the third was they thought they knew Russia super well.

JOHN KIRBY: The Ukrainians obviously saw things in a slightly different perspective — it wasn’t as if we saw everything exactly the same way.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: I remember asking questions of our briefers about why Ukraine was skeptical, and I don’t know that I ever got a clear sense of whether this was the Ukrainian government trying to maintain calm, but at a certain point, the desire to stay calm has to give way to the need to prepare.

MATTHEW MILLER: I don’t think we knew at that time — and maybe still don’t to this day — how much was actual skepticism on [Zelenskyy’s] part and how much was putting forward a brave face to keep his economy from crumbling and a refugee crisis from happening. For all the skepticism that the Ukrainians weren’t doing enough to prepare in advance, I think the early days of the war disproved that idea.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: The Ukrainians, at the very end — probably about two weeks prior — really begin to mobilize their country into a nation at arms. They really got into full swing, where you started seeing all the men — and a lot of the women — learning how to use weapons, mines, hand grenades, explosives and all that stuff. Then you also saw a significant mobilization of Ukrainian people into the army — reservists — and you saw the disposition of the Ukrainian forces to begin to change into their wartime locations.

There was a large evacuation of civilians out of what was expected to be the frontline areas, a real flurry of diplomatic activity, and then also decisions made by the international community — most countries pulled out their embassies out of Kyiv. That’s a big, big decision. When you start seeing stuff like that happening, you start realizing that war is getting close.

 

[bnew]

As it became clearer that an invasion was imminent, many Ukrainian civilians began training to defend their homeland, while thousands of others were forced to evacuate. | Vadim Ghirda and Emilio Morenatti/AP Photos

JAMES HOPE: We actually started drawing down families of staff in late January. Then that week of February 10, there were a lot of really strong public statements. We went on what’s called “ordered departure” on the 12th of February, which was essentially all non-essential personnel leave, evacuate, and we moved to Lviv in western Ukraine. Then two or three days later, the embassy actually closed, and the rest of those who were still in Kyiv moved up to Lviv and we operated there for about a week or so. Then we evacuated into southeastern Poland a few days before February 24. It was pretty chaotic.

DEREK CHOLLET: You’re always reluctant to close an embassy. It’s a very labor-intensive process just to prepare the embassy for closure, because you have to assume that there may be some time until you can get back in there. Stuff has to get destroyed; stuff has to get locked up. It’s an elaborate process.

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: I did the same with U.S. citizens in Moscow — we provided warnings, travel warnings for Americans thinking about traveling to Moscow. There were a variety of concerns that we had — the wrongful detention of Americans, Covid — then there was the threat of a major land war in Europe. I would do fairly regular video teleconferences with the American Chamber of Commerce in Moscow. At the time, before the invasion, there were over 1,200 U.S. businesses doing business in Russia. I wanted to make sure they had all the latest information that I could provide.

WALLY ADEYEMO: It went from “If they’re going to do it,” to “When they’re going to do it.”

VIII: ON THE PRECIPICE

‘THE LAST OPPORTUNITY’​

DAYS BEFORE THE INVASION​

VICTORIA NULAND: We tried to use the Munich Security Conference [February 18-20] to get everybody focused.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: That’s what everybody was talking about [in Munich]. We had bilateral meetings with all kinds of folks, and we met with the mayor of Kyiv — the boxer. They were of the opinion they were going to get invaded. They were asking for more sanctions, for weapons, “Help us push back, we’re not asking for soldiers.” It was a very, very passionate plea. I said: “Listen, I don’t know if we’ll act in the way you’re asking in time to make a difference. But if it does come, if you can defy the narrative that you’re going to be walked all over and not a lost cause, then it will be much easier to rally Congress to your side.”

I told the mayor, I said, “If you can hold out, and two weeks after the invasion you’re still standing, still fighting — it’s like Rocky, you’re a fighter, right? Just show us that you’re Rocky.”

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), left, and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), center, converse with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 19, 2022. | Pool photo by Andrew Harnik

LIZ TRUSS: Zelenskyy was at the conference and gave a brilliant speech.

AMANDA SLOAT: Lots of people were questioning the wisdom of whether he should go to Munich. People meeting with him at Munich wondered if they were ever going to see him again. From his perspective, it was the last opportunity for him to go and talk face-to-face to leaders and rally support.

DAME KAREN PIERCE: I worried that while Zelenskyy was out of the country, the Russians might try something.

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: On Saturday the 19th, Secretary Blinken was at the Munich Security Conference, and he called me. He asked me about the mood at the embassy. What I said was, “It feels like August 31, 1939, the night before Germany invaded Poland. The Russians are going to do this — they’re going to launch a major land war on the continent of Europe, first time it’s happened since 1945. Putin is really going to do it.”

Zelenskyy walks into the Bayerischer Hof Hotel after meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris during the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 19, 2022. | Pool photo by Andrew Harnik

LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: February 19th to the 21st was a three-day weekend. I had not seen my family in Louisiana for two years. I woke up on Friday morning, I’m like, “I need to see my family.” I got the ticket to Louisiana. I literally left at the end of the workday on Friday with the idea I would stay for the weekend, be back in town on Monday for whatever might happen. I arrived in Houston and got the message that things were beginning to intensify. I was so close to Louisiana, I said, “I am going to see my family.” I hadn’t even told them I was coming. My security detail found a secure location where I could go and receive phone calls. I ended up spending Saturday and Sunday in Louisiana, then flew back at like four o’clock in the morning, but worked the entire two days that I was in Louisiana.

LIZ TRUSS: The Winter Olympics ended on the 20th, so all that week, it was very tense.

MATTHEW MILLER: The day after, the 21st, is when Putin gives that speech and declares that he recognizes the Republic of Donetsk and Republic of Luhansk .

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: It’s a long, weird speech. He wheels out all of his senior advisers, including the head of the SVR — the Foreign Intelligence Service — Sergey Naryshkin, whom he embarrassed — really humiliated — and asks each of them, “Do you agree that we should recognize these republics?” Naryshkin — he was clearly nervous and flustered — said something like, “Yes, we should absorb them into the Russian Federation.” Putin just shakes his head, rolls his eyes: “I didn’t ask you that. I just asked you about recognizing their independence. Yes or no?”

AVRIL HAINES: One of the things I find fascinating about Russia is the degree to which they pay attention to the legal aspects of what they’re doing, despite the fact that they’re violating international law in pretty robust ways. These things matter. The extraordinary lengths to which they went to have the Republic of Donetsk and Luhansk declare [independence], then the treaty, the ratification of it, and then, using that as a basis for collective self-defense in response? It’s fascinating.

 

[bnew]

People in Donetsk wave Russian national flags to celebrate the recognition of its independence on Feb. 21, 2022. | Alexei Alexandrov/AP Photo

DEREK CHOLLET: At some point in mid-February, Tom Sullivan came into our office — it was the secretary and me — and said that the IC has new information that Putin had ordered the invasion to begin in the next several days, at the time they’re targeting about February 22. We just took it as a matter of fact. The strategic warning was there, but now we were starting to see Russian forces moving in tactical positions, preparing armaments and vehicles for air drops, cranking up their disinformation. All of the indicators for an imminent attack were building.

AVRIL HAINES: In the couple of days leading up to it, I don’t think many of us saw home very much. We knew we were on the precipice.

IX: THE INVASION

‘NOW WE HAVE A DOZEN MISSILES LAUNCHED’​

FEBRUARY 22ND – 25TH​

EMILY HORNE: The night before the invasion began, I went to a dinner at the French ambassador’s residence. People were surprised to see me. I said, “Look, I’ve got to eat and I’m sick of eating at the mess,” because I’ve been getting all my meals there, and “I’m going back to the office after this.”

PASCAL CONFAVREUX, spokesperson, French Embassy to the USA, Washington: We have a format of discussion at the residence, which is called the “Kalorama conversations,” a Chatham House one-room discussion. We have 35, 40, 45 people in a room — journalists, members of the administration or of Congress. We organized one on the evening of February 22 on Russia and Ukraine. The discussion was intense — more serious than usual. We all thought we are maybe on the brink of something. We can only imagine what it could be.

EMILY HORNE: Even then, the night of the 22nd, people were still saying “He won’t do it. It’s too irrational. He’s got too much to lose.” I remember shaking my head and thinking, “I’d really love nothing more than to be wrong on this, but I’m terrified that a lot of people are going to be dead in 48 hours.”

LIZ TRUSS: Right until the invasion happened, rationally you understood that it was very likely to happen, but you don’t want to believe because it is so appalling.

Kyiv on Feb. 21, 2022 — just three days before Russia invaded Ukraine. | Chris McGrath/Getty Images

JAKE SULLIVAN: What was hard to process was that the evidence overwhelmingly pointed to the fact that this was going to happen, and yet the intelligence also overwhelmingly pointed to the fact that this was — I think the technical term is — “a crazy thing to do.” It’s weird to process both of those at the same time: OK, this is going to happen, and it is really strategically, morally bankrupt, and bereft of common sense — yet, there they were, going off to do it. There was an element of “What the hell are you guys thinking?”

DEREK CHOLLET: I remember prior to the invasion — literally a day or two before — I was driving into work early one morning, and I got a text from a former colleague who served in the George W. Bush administration, saying “I really hope you guys are right. I’m just worried about the damage to U.S. credibility if you’re wrong about this invasion.” And I texted him back saying, “This is one time I really want to be wrong, but I don’t think I am. But I would take the hit to our reputation if I were wrong.”

ANTONY BLINKEN: There may have been some skepticism that creeped in among some of our partners, “Oh, we’ve given the ultimate warning, and then it hadn’t happened.” What I remember is in the early hours of the 23rd Washington time, I got a call from one of my most senior European counterparts, who shall remain nameless. I shared we thought the invasion was now imminent. This colleague said, “You’re still saying that?” I got a call back right after the invasion — very early the next morning — with this colleague ruefully saying, “Well, you were right.”

Putin (center right) attends a wreath-laying ceremony for Defender of the Fatherland Day — which began in 1918 to recognize the creation of the Red Army — in Moscow on Feb. 23, 2022. | Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: The 23rd is Wednesday — Defenders of the Fatherland Day in Russia, a day to recognize the Russian armed forces and Russian military. We had a 24-hour watch at the embassy to monitor the situation, and whoever the watch-standers were were to wake me up if the invasion had begun. It was three, four o’clock in the morning, I got a call telling me I needed to get to the embassy. The invasion had begun. Putin gives a statement, that’s when they started talking about the “special military operation.”

BILL BURNS: It was the evening of the 23rd, our time, early morning hours of the 24th in Ukraine.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: This thing kicks off at 0-dark-thirty. Bullets start flying. The actual artillery and pre-assault fires, that starts at about 0400 [Ukraine Time].

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: We had a meeting on Ukraine in the General Assembly [on the 23rd]. The Ukrainian foreign minister was in town. I met with him for lunch. He left to go back to Ukraine, and then at nine o’clock at night, the Ukrainians called for an emergency meeting at the Security Council. The meeting is underway — I had already spoken — then all of our phones started to buzz. Everybody picked up their phones at the same time. I got a text message from the Ukrainian Permanent Representative saying the attack has started. And then I’m seeing somebody bring over a phone to the Russian PR [permanent representative] — he’s the president of the Security Council, so he was actually presiding. He’s clearly read that the attack started. Everybody continued to speak, but I asked for the floor again, to say, “Clearly, the Russians have not heard the call for diplomacy. And this attack has started.”

Missiles rained down across Ukraine on the first days of the invasion, causing widespread death and destruction. Once the missiles launched, there was no going back. | Daniel Leal, Wolfgang Schwan and Chris McGrath, via Getty Images

CELESTE WALLANDER, assistant secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Pentagon: We had been late in the evening in an assessment meeting with Secretary Austin: What are the signs, what are we seeing? I walked back to my office at 10 p.m., and it was the first television reports and missile strikes.

TOM SULLIVAN: We were gathered in the operations center. The secretary had gone home — this is around 9:30 or so. We had pretty good indications it was imminent. We got notification of a missile launch from Russia tracking toward Ukraine. Then, “OK, now we have a dozen missiles launched.”

LAURA COOPER: The real sign was the missile strikes.

DEREK CHOLLET: I do remember thinking — and I remember talking to colleagues the next day — that it started later than I thought. In retrospect, I realized I’d become accustomed to the U.S. way of doing things, where the concept of operations was you would want as much night as possible because that was when you had a lot of advantage. Turns out the Russians aren’t as good at night as we are.

MATTHEW MILLER: Really until the last moment, until the moment that the missiles were in the air, I felt some hope, however faint, that it might be averted.

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE: I felt like all my senses were active, and reading all the things that we had in intelligence, there’s a couple of thoughts that come to mind: First of all, it’s, “Oh, my gosh, we are that good as an intelligence community.” The second piece is, “OK, so how can we further help what’s going on in Ukraine?”

 

[bnew]

VICTORIA NULAND: The day of was this horrible, awful realization that he had not bluffed.

“The day of was this horrible, awful realization that he had not bluffed.”​

—VICTORIA NULAND​

DEREK CHOLLET: It’s just another reminder that the U.S. can’t dictate events. We have more influence than anyone else, but ultimately, we can’t control others if they choose to do incredibly stupid things.

MATTHEW MILLER: There is sometimes this unrealistic sense that America can wave a magic wand and control the world. That’s just not true. We don’t have magic wands.

PASCAL CONFAVREUX: There was a feeling of acceleration of history. As diplomats sometimes you feel that you are the first spectators of such things, a moment where also many parts are moving at the same moment — bilateral relations, transatlantic relations, European Union, defense.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: 123 battalion battlegroups invaded on that day — that’s not including the irregulars, that’s Russian army.

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: At that point, when the special military operation began, that was pick your favorite metaphor: Sea change, crossing the Rubicon. All bets were off, everything changed, and it was never going to go back to being the way it used to be.

DEREK CHOLLET: Once it was underway, like many people, we would watch it on TV. It reminded me of the early days of the Persian Gulf War in January of 1991.

Ukrainian volunteers sort donated foods for distribution to the local population in Lviv on March 2, 2022, while Zelenskyy appears on television. | Bernat Armangue/AP Photo

PASCAL CONFAVREUX: I think CNN became again the channel of the 24/7 war, and I remember also everyone rushing on Twitter, because it was a war followed completely on Twitter.

JAMES HOPE: I found out that the war had started when I woke up about 6 a.m. [in Poland]. The first thing you do is check your phone, and there it is: News reports and video and probably 1,000 WhatsApp messages from partners and friends in Ukraine. That was one of the more difficult wake-up moments ever. I immediately went downstairs in the hotel, where we would normally gather as our embassy’s team in the morning, and everyone was there. We kicked into high gear.

ANTONY BLINKEN: We all got notified. I have at home — and others have at home — a secure room where we can be in immediate communication with all our counterparts, as well as people around the world, by phone, by video, etc. We were all connected and got the situation reports from the Pentagon and from the intelligence community.

TOM SULLIVAN: We had basically a response plan that had already been well coordinated in the interagency. He quickly got on the phone with the secretary of defense, together they called NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg.

JON FINER: We were down in the Situation Room, and the president was back in his residence. We were talking to him very regularly on our secure phone, and [chief of staff] Ron Klain was coming in and out to the president in his residence. He asked to talk to President Zelenskyy, which we thought was a good and important idea. We were able to connect them pretty quickly. Given how many conversations they had had before that, and how many they have had since, that one has always struck me because it was conducted on such a human and personal level.

It was a conversation between two people who have been preparing for and were about to embark on an enormous world-changing project. Zelenskyy said something to the effect of, “I don’t know when I will be able to talk to you again” — and that hung in the air because we didn’t know in that moment whether he meant because something might happen or just because phone connectivity might go down. It brought home how real this all was, yes for us, but primarily for the people who are going to be facing this onslaught from the Russians. The president responded: “If you ever want to talk to me, I’m here.”

TOM SULLIVAN: That was a pretty long night.

AVRIL HAINES: I remember coming [home] quietly. My husband was already in bed, he had the television on, and that sense of, “It’s finally happened.” There was a horror of what this meant for the Ukrainian people — honestly also for the Russian soldiers that were getting pushed into this. The humanity of it is so disturbing on so many levels.

DALEEP SINGH: I remember getting emails and phone calls from contacts in Ukraine, they were in most cases huddled with their families and scared. I’ll never forget the sound of their voice.

JAMES HOPE: It was shocking, completely shocking — worrying about friends and colleagues, the images coming out of rockets striking residential buildings in Kyiv. You don’t know, do our friends live there? Do our coworkers live there?

X: WAR

‘OK, IT’S GO TIME’​

HOURS AFTER THE INVASION​

ANTONY BLINKEN: That kicked off — well, it’s been very intense pretty much since then — but a very intense next day here in Washington.

DEREK CHOLLET: We had established a playbook for the opening weeks, what we all would be doing — from the President on down — to rally the coalition, to get support to Ukraine.

WALLY ADEYEMO: We were aligned, not just here in the United States, but with our allies and partners.

LIZ TRUSS: It is no secret that all the allies were not in the same place. What has happened, though, is that we moved together.

“It was a savage invasion at the upper end of anyone’s expectations.”​

—DALEEP SINGH​

DALEEP SINGH: The Europeans were participating fully in the sanctions design effort, but when I would have conversations with my counterparts — Björn Seibert, at the European Commission, but also Jonathan Black, who is Boris Johnson’s sherpa and the others — the Europeans emphasized many times that the visuals would matter. In other words, this invasion had to actually be something that political leaders could see on screen — that’s what would create the emotional valence needed to implement the packages as ambitious as the one that we were putting together.

I remember getting up at 3 a.m., and getting in touch with Björn. He immediately said, “Yeah, OK, I see the visuals.” It was a savage invasion at the upper end of anyone’s expectations, and his leaders were seeing schools and orphanages and maternity wards getting bombed. And I said, “OK, it’s go time,” and everything changed. After pushing this boulder up the hill for months, it started to roll down in terms of momentum to deliver these sanctions. That was a real inflection point, once imagery captured the hearts of the leadership in Europe.

VICTORIA NULAND: We were preparing for many scenarios in which the Ukrainians essentially had to get Kyiv back, get their country back — potentially a government-in-exile. We didn’t know which scenario we were going to be looking at.

ANTONY BLINKEN: There was a Principals Committee meeting with the entire team early in the morning on the 24th, our time.

CELESTE WALLANDER: It was focused on an update of how the Russian invasion was unfolding, the likely course of action, and a status update: How well are the Russians doing? How well are the Ukrainians doing? Checking in on what we were doing to support the Ukrainians. A big element of those meetings was about the reinforcement of U.S. commitment to NATO to reinforce Article Five credible deterrence — movements of U.S. capabilities to the European theater.

 

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G-7 leaders, including Biden (top left), take part in a virtual meeting about Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. | Pool photo by Ludovic Marin

EMILY HORNE: The message was: “We prepared for this. We’re as ready as we can be. We’ve built this coalition of international allies and partners to be ready for this. We’ve done everything we can to date to support the Ukrainians, and we’ll do more. We have a good story to tell about how we have prepared for this. So let’s go out there and tell it now.”

ANTONY BLINKEN: We stood up immediately a virtual G-7 leader summit that the president led. I then spoke to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The president went out and spoke publicly. I spoke with my Ukrainian counterpart — one of dozens of conversations we had in that period of time — with the UN secretary general; with foreign ministers from the Baltic countries; with my Turkish counterpart; my Indian counterpart; my Emirati counterpart; my Polish counterpart; the Israeli foreign minister. Somehow, we managed also to talk to many in the media. Then several of us did all-Senate briefings and all-House briefings. All of that was in the space of February 24.

Blinken (right) and Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba walk from the stage after a news conference at the State Department in Washington D.C. on Feb. 22, 2022. | Pool photo by Carolyn Kaster

GEN. MARK MILLEY: We needed to make sure that Russia did not attack or invade a NATO Article Five country, so under the direction of the president and the secretary of defense, we prepared plans to rapidly deploy U.S. forces to all of the NATO frontline countries — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, etc. On the day of the invasion, we went ahead and deployed U.S. military ground forces to each one of those countries. It was very rapid, within 24 hours of the invasion. The purpose was to send a clear, unambiguous message to Putin not to attack a NATO Article Five country. President Biden said we will defend every inch of NATO territory; he was serious about it and backed it up with U.S. forces. We doubled the amount of surface fleet in Europe, and for air forces we probably increased by maybe a third of what we had before all this activity. For ground forces, we sent a couple of additional brigades and division headquarters.

We made a substantial increase: 1 September, I think the number is about 75,000 U.S. forces in total in Europe — all types, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. By the invasion, I think we had just over 100,000.

On the day of the invasion, the U.S. rapidly deployed military ground forces to Poland, shown above, and all of the NATO frontline countries. | Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via AP

DALEEP SINGH: It wasn’t yet totally clear that it was a full-scale invasion, and so we delivered a [sanctions] package on that first day that was the most severe package we’d ever delivered, but it wasn’t the economic shock and awe that we had prepared. We fully blocked, froze the assets of VTB, the second-largest Russian bank. We did something similar to the largest bank, SberBank. We put on the export controls and sanctioned about 13 state-owned enterprises. My feeling was this is an inadequate response relative to the savagery of the invasion.

My conversations that day to my bosses, Jake, and the Big Boss and others was, “If not now, when are we going to deliver the full scale of our sanctions arsenal?” By the evening of the 25th — it was Friday night — I drafted a G-7 statement outlining shock and awe in very plainly written prose on one page. That was the package that de-SWIFT-ed Russia’s largest banks [removing the banks from the international banking clearinghouse known as SWIFT]. The most important part was going nuclear on Russia’s central bank. Russia built a war chest of foreign reserves in the previous eight years, so the only way to truly deliver a knockout blow to Russia, in terms of its economy, would be to make that fortress buckle. That would require all the major central banks of the world agreeing not to transact with Russia’s central bank.

EMILY HORNE: The Europeans almost seemed to be trying to one-up each other with what they could come out with. A real turning point was Scholz saying that Nord Stream 2 was going to be put on pause — the speed and the enormity of that announcement from the Germans, no less, was a signal to the rest of Europe that we just turned to a new chapter. It was time for everyone to get with the program.

DEREK CHOLLET: I count myself as someone who always thought the Europeans were being undersold in terms of their willingness to impose sanctions and meaningful costs on the Russians. There’s a stereotype here in Washington that I’ve seen over the last 20-plus years that the Europeans will fold like cheap suits. I never believed that.

“There’s a stereotype here in Washington that I’ve seen over the last 20-plus years that the Europeans will fold like cheap suits. I never believed that.”​

—DEREK CHOLLET​

Nevertheless, I think even their resilience and strength has surprised them. I was not surprised that Germans made the bold decision that they did in the early days to begin supplying lethal assistance to Ukraine and increase their defense budget and Scholz’s speech that he gave the weekend of the invasion.

LIZ TRUSS: Putin made a massive miscalculation, he misunderstood how united the free world would be. It wasn’t just us and the Americans — or indeed us, the European Union, and the Americans putting sanctions — it was Japan, it was Singapore, it was Australia, it was South Korea, it was even countries like Switzerland, who hadn’t put sanctions on before. It was a much bigger, more comprehensive sanctions package than I think he ever could have imagined happening.

DALEEP SINGH: Saturday, the president was in Wilmington, so some of us were huddled in Jake’s office. A number of Principals were in the room. Jake gave a situational update, and then he asked me to present the [sanctions] package to the president. I described what was on that one-pager, cutting off the largest Russian financial institutions from the Gmail of the global banking system — SWIFT — and then disarming Russia’s war chest and why that was important. There was a lot of nodding in the room. The president wanted to know more about why we wanted to move forward the central bank action. My response was because: he’s not expecting it. And if we don’t allow Russia’s central bank to buy rubles to defend its value, that’s how we would generate an economic shock and awe.

Yellen didn’t feel like she had enough time to think about it and the potential effects, so we broke without a full decision, but after more conversations, including having [Italian] Prime Minister [Mario] Draghi express his view, we convinced Secretary Yellen that this was the right thing to do. There was no time to waste. Then we were going, “Let’s go get the U.K., Canada, Japan, and anybody else that we can secure before 5 p.m. Eastern.” This is getting late in the day for Europe — they wanted to get this thing out — but Japan was sleeping, so I had to wake up the sherpa who was trying to get the prime minister on the phone. It wasn’t really enough time. I had to apologize profusely and explain you can just join this in the morning, which they did.

 

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WALLY ADEYEMO: We started high and we stayed high. We immobilized their assets, which meant that their assets now were going to be trapped around the world, and they couldn’t use them by bringing them back to Russia and using them to buy things in other countries.

JON FINER: The export controls that we impose on Russia, they don’t get as much attention but in terms of being able to actually inhibit the development of the Russian military over the medium and long term, controlling their access to advanced technologies, like semiconductors is going to be as significant as almost anything else we’ve done.

The collective sanctions imposed on Russia had a massive negative effect on its economy. "It was a much bigger, more comprehensive sanctions package than I think he ever could have imagined happening," Liz Truss said. | Konstantin Zavrazhin/Getty Images, Francisco Ubilla/AP Photo, Alexander Sayganov/Sipa USA via AP, and Sean Gallup/Getty Images

DALEEP SINGH: I remember Jake was like, “Is this going to work?“ I said, “Well, let’s just wait for New Zealand.” New Zealand is the first currency market on Sundays — that’s the start of the weekend global markets. I fully expected a catastrophic open for the Russian ruble, because no major central bank had ever been sanctioned in this way. Everyone with rubles is going to try to get out all at once. I started to worry a little bit about almost too much catastrophic success — could this be too much of a bad thing?

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: The ruble cratered.

LIZ TRUSS: We’ve seen the Russian economy pushed back decades by the effect of those sanctions.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH: I’ve learned a lot about the power of unity — globally, in terms of standing up for a rules-based order, standing up for Article Five, the unity of NATO.

WALLY ADEYEMO: What happened almost immediately was a number of private sector firms were calling and telling us that in response to stakeholder pressure they were thinking about pulling out of Russia. We saw almost immediately a number of companies start sanctioning themselves — that was also having a huge impact in terms of the Russian economy. We started to see an accelerated movement of not only foreign capital but Russian capital out of Russia because everybody knew the situation was just going to get worse over time.

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: The luxury stores all closed almost immediately [in Moscow]. The Lamborghini dealership, the Gucci stores, etc., they left the lights on, and put discreet notes on their front door saying, “Temporarily Closed.” Moscow was surreal — everything was peaceful and quiet at the embassy.

“Moscow was surreal—everything was peaceful and quiet at the embassy.”

—AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN

LISA MONACO, deputy attorney general, Department of Justice: We stood up what we called Task Force KleptoCapture nine days after the invasion to enforce these sanctions in a major way. As we saw it, sanctions are only as effective as their enforcement, so we wanted to make sure we had an unprecedented enforcement mechanism to accompany the unprecedented sanctions that Wally, Daleep, their teams, and others across the government had helped rally the world around. We joked Wally was “freeze” and we were “seize.”

But to us, this task force was also about exposing the stunning corruption that Putin has used to solidify and hold power and that has enabled his brutal war machine. We focused right away on oligarchs to expose the corruption and to do everything we could to go after their ill-gotten gains — whether in bank accounts here or in the form of planes or yachts, you name it — and to say that there’s no place that they can hide. This was a new way of doing business for us. I now get a daily intelligence report about where these oligarchs’ assets are and how we’re going after them.

ANNE NEUBERGER: DDoS attacks occurred against Ukrainian government systems, and because we were so concerned this was larger — an attempt to destabilize, demoralize Ukraine — we worked to rapidly have them deploy DDoS protections, and also attribute the attacks publicly [to Russia] in two to three days, which we never do. I went to the podium [in the White House press briefing room] to convey the message that as the President has said, “Any disruptive attacks would be taken seriously.” We worked very closely with our European partners, as well, to attribute [to Russia] the first destructive attack that was done, the Viasat attack .

TOM SULLIVAN: The next two weeks are a total blur.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH: I don’t remember a single day that actually stands out.

JAMES HOPE: One giant blur of phone calls and meetings and tracking down people.

VICTORIA NULAND: There were about eight nights where I had less than four hours sleep.

TOM SULLIVAN: My wife works in government as well, and we were talking about this on a regular basis — trying to explain to the two older kids, who were six and three, what we were trying to do. We were traveling around, I was working such long hours, my wife was trying to explain when they would say, “Why isn’t daddy home?” First it was: “They’re trying to stop Russia from invading Ukraine.” Then it was: “They’re helping Ukraine stand up to Russia’s invasion.” The kids started to learn about Kyiv and places like that — in a way it was endearing, at the same time, it was horrifying that this is how they have to learn about things like this.

DALEEP SINGH: My wife got used to me working out of our bed from 3 to about 6 a.m., and then I would have a peaceful drive to work along the Potomac, and then back at it until usually 11 o’clock or midnight.

JAMES HOPE: The main comment from my wife was, “I guess we’re not going to see you for a few weeks.” I said, “Yeah, that’s probably true.”

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: I moved out of [the ambassador’s residence] Spaso House. After the 24th, I moved a bunch of my clothes into a townhouse on the embassy compound. From that day, until I left as ambassador later in the year, I lived on the compound. President Biden made it clear to me he wanted to keep our embassy open.

LAURA COOPER: We had a lot of ramen noodles. We had this folding table set-up in our lobby reception area [in our Pentagon suite] — one of the other teams sent out this sign-up sheet for people to bring us food. We would have dinner deliveries, breakfast deliveries. It was really a beautiful thing. We had some aficionados at the Eden Center [a Northern Virginia center of Vietnamese culture], who bought massive containers of authentic ramen noodles that fed us at all hours of the night.

 

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XI: THE RUSSIANS FALTER

‘PUTIN MISCALCULATED’​

DAYS AFTER THE INVASION​

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: When we saw that thrust south from Belarus, the amount of equipment and the number of personnel who are heading south — it’s not that far to Kyiv — I thought, “Boy, it’s blitzkrieg. They’re going to be in Kyiv.”

LAURA COOPER: We were watching so closely to see what the signs of damage would be. One of our biggest concerns was that Russia could take out Ukrainian air defenses in those opening moments of the war, and Russia could have gained air superiority. There was certainly this realization that built over that day that the Russian strikes were not that effective — certainly there was damage, but not nearly on a scale that one might have expected. That was a big realization that the Ukrainians would be able to withstand a lot, actually, right off the bat.

VICTORIA NULAND: There were many things we were expecting that actually didn’t happen: Massive cyberattack across Ukraine that debilitated their ability to respond; a far more effective Russian move off the airport outside of Kyiv into the city. None of us expected the Ukrainians to be able to withstand as strongly as they did in those first four or five days.

DEREK CHOLLET: We learned a lot about the character and courage of leaders like Zelenskyy, who unquestionably rose to the moment in ways that are inspiring, frankly — and not just the president, but the Ukrainian leadership and the Ukrainian people.

Zelenskyy addressed Congress on March 16, 2022. "I don’t know that we could have predicted what extraordinary leadership he would give during the war," said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif). | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: Particularly after seeing how the Afghan military melted away in the face of the Taliban, we had a lot of skepticism about how well we could identify the will to fight.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH: That’s one of those things that until a country goes through something like this, you’ll just never know.

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: The notion of will to fight and analyzing the will of fight is a dynamic thing. It is not a static thing. If you looked at the capability and capacity of the “New Look” Russian army, and at the capability and capacity of the Ukrainian military as we saw it at the time, we thought it would go very badly and very quickly for the Ukrainians. Actually, they did pretty well.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: Zelenskyy was a master — and still is a master — of the airwaves, creating a narrative, maintaining societal cohesion, motivating and inspiring not only his society, but the world.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: That was another miscalculation on Putin’s part — he thought Zelenskyy would be a weak leader or flee the country. I don’t know that we could have predicted what extraordinary leadership he would give during the war. I don’t know that anyone who hasn’t faced that kind of situation knows exactly how they’ll perform, but he is brilliant.

JAMES HOPE: The most unique thing about this whole response and experience is that the government of Ukraine and non-government part of Ukraine — private sector, civil society — never lost their resilience, never lost their capacity, never lost their passion for engaging and responding to war breaking out.

BILL BURNS: Our analysts here never underestimated the sense of Ukrainian determination — this was their territory and they were going to defend it — what I think it’s probably fair to say is that we did not understand clearly enough how ineffective the Russian military was going to be.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: It is certainly fair to say that the U.S. miscalculated the Russian’s military capability — perhaps only somewhat less than Putin miscalculated his own military capability.

CELESTE WALLANDER: They were much less capable, the plan was much less coherent, there was much more dysfunction in the Russian military than was apparent in their exercises. The Russians were overconfident based on how easy it had been for them to intervene in Syria, and in fact that was not a good test of their capabilities.

“They were much less capable, the plan was much less coherent, there was much more dysfunction in the Russian military than was apparent in their exercises.”​

—CELESTE WALLANDER​

GEN. MARK MILLEY: The Russians thought that they had an effective competent army to execute combined arms maneuver, which is a very specific thing. The United States military does that very well, a few other militaries. What that means is they could coordinate and synchronize dismounted infantry with mounted infantry, mechanized infantry with armored tanks, with mortars, artillery, close air support, electronic warfare engineers, medical sustainment — you bring it all together in time and space to achieve your desired effect. As it turned out, they couldn’t do it. They stumbled around and they couldn’t pull it together.

LAURA COOPER: We were all looking at the situation incredibly closely, looking for signs that the Ukrainians were able to repel those early attacks. We were watching to see, “Can the Ukrainians hold on to the airfields?” When we saw Hostomel airfield, in particular, when we saw that Russia wasn’t able to just come in and take it — the Ukrainians were fighting fiercely, resisting, and the Russians were unable to land their reinforcements — that was a real turning point.

VICTORIA NULAND: All of a sudden, we realized that Ukraine — and particularly the government, the leadership, the capital — might be able to resist.

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: All of those turned my thinking that, “Hey, these guys are in it to win it and they are going to fight hard.” Probably within a week our thinking has changed radically on that.

LAURA COOPER: What we grew to realize in the coming days, as we saw the Ukrainians responding, was just how capable the Ukrainian air defenders had been in those early moments, and just how capable they had been in defending their cities and their forces.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: The Russians have never achieved air superiority. Because they haven’t achieved air superiority, they didn’t have close air support for the ground forces. Another thing that they didn’t do — which everyone thought they would do — is effectively use electronic warfare, jamming, shutting down the electronic spectrum. We don’t really know yet why they didn’t. One thing could be that the Russian radios and the Ukrainian radios were essentially the same old Soviet-era model radios, using the same spectrum, same frequency band. So if you shut down the Ukrainian radios, then you might be shutting down your own radio?

Another reason might be that the Russians anticipated taking over the commercial air waves — the television stations, the radio stations — in order to put out their propaganda. The Russian special forces and intelligence services are specifically tasked to do that, and they failed. They have a lot of special operations forces, and usually we think they’re pretty well trained, but their special operations forces did not, as best I can tell, play a significant role in Russian operations. Everybody thought that they would be much more effective. Their paratroopers, assault forces, were not nearly as effective as we would have thought.

AVRIL HAINES: They expected the Ukrainians to welcome them in some respects; they were planning for a different fight than they actually ended up in.

JOHN KIRBY: We were surprised to see that in just basic military operations, the Russians did not seem to have a good plan. It was almost like they were fighting a war in small silos.

BILL BURNS: There were fairly senior Russian military leaders we could see in intelligence who were just trying to catch up with the decision to invade, even as it was flowing. Commanders of units didn’t really understand what their goals were.

The Russian military operation was much less effective than U.S. intelligence initially anticipated, allowing Ukraine to resist attacks and maintain control over territory. | Rodrigo Abd and Marienko Andrew/AP Photos

 

[bnew]

GEN. MARK MILLEY: In the Russian system, it’s very top down — centralized command and control. The Ukrainians were brought up under the Soviet system, so they had the same system — top down — but in 2014, we go in there and start training them after the invasion of Crimea. The western method — what America calls mission command — essentially says that you authorize and delegate authority to conduct military activity or operations to the lowest level at which it can be successfully executed. You empower junior officers and junior noncommissioned officers to execute tactical operations. A battlefield is a very dynamic thing, and they’re going to respond to the exigencies of a battlefield at the time. You need to empower them to make the right decisions. It makes for a very decentralized method of command that is very effective in combat because warfare is a very dynamic environment filled with chaos, confusion and fear.

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: They don’t have a great NCO [noncommissioned officer] corps like we do — that’s the backbone, our noncommissioned officers — and they don’t do free play exercises that allow them to learn and grow. They’re very scripted.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: What is the result on the actual battlefield here in Ukraine? The result is you’ll get a Russian battalion with several companies and platoons going down the road in a singular column, they’ll get attacked, and let’s say the battalion commander gets killed or wounded. The others will not know what to do at that point. They’re paralyzed. They’re just sitting ducks. You saw it on videos, where they sat there on roads, and they just got pummeled by the Ukrainians.

AVRIL HAINES: They ran out of gas and had a pileup on one of their axes into Ukraine, and I remember Lloyd [Austin] saying, “That is the kind of logistics problem that you cannot solve in hours or days.”

AMANDA SLOAT: If you need a tangible image of things not going well, it’s when the tanks that were supposed to be rolling into Kyiv within three days and taking over the city are stuck in a traffic jam on the highway and not moving.

JOHN KIRBY: We began to pick up signs that soldiers were complaining about running out of food, not being able to eat, and running out of ammunition.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: We knew they would struggle with [logistics] because they have a very poor track record of doing it. They did not evacuate casualties — they had a very high died-of-wounds ratio. They did not effectively evacuate broken vehicles in order to repair them; they just left them on the battlefield. They didn’t adequately resupply their forces with ammunition, water and food. Their logistics system has proven to be very poor, and they never adequately fixed it.

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: Some of the calamities that befell the Russian military people just have forgotten about — they had their troops digging trenches in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, digging up irradiated soil and poisoning their own people; their flagship for the Black Sea, the Moskva, was sunk by Ukrainian missiles; the number of general officers using cell phones and getting blown up. It was pretty catastrophic and shambolic.

An image from social media showed the Russian ship, the Moskva, after being struck by Ukrainian missiles in the Black Sea on April 14 2022.

DEREK CHOLLET: It’s always shocking to see that Putin seems to have no limits in what he seems to be willing to do — the brutality with which the campaign’s been conducted, the willingness he’s shown to see his own troops chewed up, the delusions he’s operating under, the whole justification of de-Nazifying Ukraine. It’s not surprising because in many ways we’ve seen this before, but it’s always shocking.

AMB. MICHAEL CARPENTER: Eight, nine days after the start of the war, I proceeded to lay out [at the OSCE Permanent Council] that we had credible information Russia would create a system of camps and that it would resort to repression, mistreatment and human rights abuses to carry out its aims in the territories that it occupied. Essentially, we were previewing what we thought would happen, which is exactly what did happen: Russia set up this system of filtration camps to distinguish between loyal Russian subjects and those who felt they wanted to remain loyal to the Ukrainian nation state. It was chilling — the implications were those of abuse, torture, mistreatment, potentially killing of Ukrainian civilians. I remember writing the statement and then rewriting it to make it even stronger to make the strongest possible case. I knew that I had the attention of my European colleagues; I knew that we had built up a lot of credibility. I knew that people would be paying attention to what I had to say, and I wanted it to be unambiguous.

DAME KAREN PIERCE: There’d been a hope that the Russians wouldn’t behave like that, and then that was just shot to pieces.

LIZ TRUSS: Some of the appalling atrocities that took place, such as the use of sexual violence — we spent quite a lot of time, making sure that we had British experts going out there to help collect evidence, as well as dealing with the immediate help the Ukrainians needed.

BILL BURNS: The Russians were responsible for some incredible brutalities in Bucha and elsewhere, but the Ukrainians, once they weathered that first blow, their sense of determination picked up.

DAME KAREN PIERCE: People did start thinking about Taiwan quite early, thinking it’s very important we get this right because the Chinese will be watching.

“People did start thinking about Taiwan quite early, thinking it’s very important we get this right because the Chinese will be watching.”

—DAME KAREN PIERCE

CELESTE WALLANDER: A big focus of that first month in those meetings was making sure we kept the [supply] pipelines open. We saw the Ukrainians effectively using the Stingers, effectively using the Javelins. That’s when we started getting in this battle rhythm of regular resupplies that the Ukrainians needed in real time.

JAMES HOPE: We immediately started sending in security gear, like vests and helmets and medical kits for journalists, so that they could do their job — get out and keep reporting on the war on the front lines. We made sure local communities had first responder capacity — simple things for their emergency service responders, flashlights, med kits, everything that you might need as a first responder in a crisis. All those kinds of items — along with all the humanitarian assistance — began to flow immediately.

COLIN KAHL: Sometimes people say, “Well, if you were going to give them this stuff, why didn’t you give them all at the beginning?” And the reality is, as a matter of dollars and logistics, we couldn’t. We’ve given $27 billion of security assistance. We didn’t have $27 billion at the beginning of the war. As a matter of actual and bureaucratic physics, you have to prioritize. What the secretary has been ruthless about is, “What does Ukraine need right now for the fight?” In the initial phases of the conflict, that was anti-armor, man-portable and short-range air defense systems, and artillery and ammunition for their Soviet legacy systems, and more Soviet legacy air defense systems. We poured in the Javelins and the Stingers and scoured our own stocks from the Cold War for Soviet era ammunition and stuff we swept up around the globe.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: Because of the nature of the Russian attack, it was essentially three categories of weaponry they needed immediately. The first was anti-armor munitions, anti-armor systems, because 200,000 Russians are attacking in mobile combined arms — mechanized infantry, and tank units. Second thing you got to do is keep the Russian Air Force at bay — hence, air defenses — and the third thing you have to do is fire artillery — basic artillery and mortars, nothing fancy. We started flowing in enormous numbers of anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, MANPADs , Stingers and others. That’s what they asked for. That’s what they wanted right away. That’s what we gave them.

COLIN KAHL: Even as we were providing thousands of anti-armor and MANPADS and doing everything else, so were the Brits, the Poles, the Baltic states and other countries from all over the world.

LIZ TRUSS: We were talking about everything — it could be a specific piece of ammunition that was required, it could be a sanction that they thought would be effective. We worked very, very closely with Ukrainians throughout. They’re the people on the front line, the people who are in the life and death situation every day.

COLIN KAHL: That assistance enabled the Ukrainians to win the Battle of Kyiv.

VICTORIA NULAND: Week one, week two, week three, we began to become more optimistic that if we helped Ukraine as much as we possibly could, that the country might survive.

LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Russia, Putin did not expect the response that they got — the isolation that they got. We really were successful in isolating them.

 

[bnew]

CONCLUSION: COLLECTIVE RESOLVE

‘A LONG, GRINDING FIGHT’​

MARCH 2022 TO TODAY​

JON FINER: The salience and unity of the NATO alliance is beyond where it has been in many decades — if not ever — and in the United States, there is division on almost everything, a 50-50 country, we have maintained a degree of support in our politics and in the public for this effort to support Ukrainians that I think has surprised many people.

DALEEP SINGH: We mustered the collective resolve of the U.S. and our closest allies and partners in ways that surprised almost everyone.

BILL BURNS: It’s the way government should work, in my opinion. The president set a very clear sense of direction. There was a shared understanding of the problem and coordination amongst the principals. Broadly speaking, the U.S. government performed the way it should perform in a situation like that.

VICTORIA NULAND: It has been an enormous interagency effort, but it’s also taught a whole new generation of American diplomats what it takes to rally global support in defense of democracy, what it feels like to be part of an endeavor that is absolutely existential for the world that they are going to live in going forward.

AVRIL HAINES: [The war] was not something that would be easily ended. We were in for a long, grinding fight.

Digging graves and carrying coffins have been commons sights throughout Ukraine during the past year. | John Moore and Sean Gallup/Getty Images

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: It has become this protracted gridlock — the race for resources, who can acquire more materiel and enough ammunition and enough soldiers who are trained.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: People don’t think about war — even today. When I say to people, “There have been 35,000 or 40,000 innocent Ukrainians killed in this war, a third of their economy has been destroyed, an estimated 7 million internally-displaced persons, and another 7 million refugees out of a pre-war population of 45 million — you’re looking at 30 to 40 percent of that country displaced out of houses.” People sit there and go: “Oh?”

Tip O’Neill — I’m from Boston, he was a Boston guy — and he said all politics are local. If it’s not happening to you, or in and around you, there’s a sense of remoteness. It doesn’t strike through the same way it does if it happens to you and your family. But for some of us, who have a lot of combat experience, who have seen a lot of war, it’s very real. For many people — good people, smart people — it’s very difficult to get your head around this stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s human nature. Just the other day, there were 1,100 Russians killed in a single day — more than that, closer to 1,200 — down around Bakhmut. That’s Iwo Jima, that’s Shiloh.

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: The Russian army in history is a learning army. They don’t seem to be learning a lot of lessons — or maybe it’s too hard to put into practice the lessons they are learning. In World War II, they actually got better as the war went on. We don’t see them applying those lessons to a great degree inside the conflict today. It will take them years to rebuild their military no matter how this turns out.

Zelenskyy addresses a joint session of Congress in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 21, 2022. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

AVRIL HAINES: One of the challenges for me, frankly, since the invasion is having to read the intelligence every day. It’s brutal. It’s absolutely brutal. This senseless war and how it’s affected people’s lives in every possible respect is deeply depressing.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: One thing that was — and still is — on my mind every day is escalation management. Russia is a nuclear-armed state. They have the capability to destroy humanity. That’s nothing to play with. We’re a big power. Russia is a big power. There’s a lot at stake here, a lot of people’s lives. Every move has to be consciously and deliberately thought through to its logical extension.

JON FINER: This war may well go on for a lot longer, but already Russia has suffered enormous costs on the battlefield and financially — their position in the world, their status, their standing, their stature has eroded significantly from where it was for February of 2022.

AMANDA SLOAT: The president has long wanted to go to Ukraine. When it became safe for Zelenskyy to make it out of the country and he visited Washington, that made the president that much more interested to be able to go himself.

Biden meets with Zelenskyy at Mariinsky Palace during an unannounced visit in Kyiv, Ukraine on Feb. 20, 2023. | Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP

JOHN KIRBY, now coordinator for strategic communications, National Security Council, White House: The president felt that it was very important to go around the date of the anniversary to make clear that though, it’s a sad anniversary one year of war, the United States was going to stay with Ukraine for as long as it takes.

JOE BIDEN, president of the United States, speaking Monday, Feb. 20, 2023, during his surprise trip to Ukraine: One year later, Kyiv stands. And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands.

FILED UNDER:

ORAL HISTORY ,

UKRAINE ,

RUSSIA’S WAR ON UKRAINE ,

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[Koapa]

Nikka Really!! Nobody reading all that.