The war that was forecast—and the failure to prepare for it

Sunday 22 Feburary 2026

In the months before 24 February 2022, Western intelligence agencies did something rare in modern European security affairs: they were broadly right, broadly early and broadly clear. The United States and the United Kingdom in particular concluded—on the basis of satellite imagery, intercepted communications and human reporting—that Russia was not merely posturing for leverage. She was preparing for a full-scale invasion, with a thrust towards Kyiv and an ambition that looked uncomfortably like regime change. 

Yet accurate forewarning did not convert into a coherent, jointly owned plan—inside Ukraine or across the Western alliance—to resist the invasion before it began. Instead there was a strange limbo: intelligence briefings grew more urgent while practical preparations remained partial, contested or politically impossible. The reasons are less mysterious than they appear. They sit at the intersection of credibility, incentives, law, economics and the deep psychological problem of believing that an adversary might do something irrational and self-destructive simply because she can.

What the agencies knew—and how they tried to prove it

The core judgement was not that Russia might attack somewhere, in some limited form. It was that a large-scale operation was being assembled, with multiple axes, and that Moscow was preparing the informational and political pretexts that usually precede her large wars. The public-facing part of this intelligence campaign included repeated warnings about manufactured provocations—‘false flag’ narratives designed to justify escalation—and a deliberate strategy of declassifying selected assessments to deny the Kremlin plausible deniability. 

This was, in effect, a wager: that transparency could serve deterrence. If Russia could not claim surprise, she would carry a higher diplomatic and economic price. If publics could see the scaffolding of the operation being erected, allied governments would find it harder to drift into denial. The strategy was unconventional precisely because intelligence services usually hoard their most persuasive material to protect sources and methods. In early 2022 Washington and London accepted the risk and went public in ways that would have been almost unthinkable during earlier crises. 

There were also private warnings delivered at senior level. Reporting after the event describes the then CIA director and others pressing the seriousness of the threat with allies and with Kyiv, including discussion of specific risks in the opening days. 

In short, the warning system did not fail. The conversion mechanism did.

Why Ukraine did not, and could not, fully mobilise in public

Ukraine in early 2022 was not a blank slate awaiting Western instruction. She had already lived through eight years of war and coercion since 2014. Her leaders had to judge not only the probability of invasion but the consequences of behaving as though invasion were certain.

President Zelenskyy and senior Ukrainian officials repeatedly warned against panic. Their stated concern was economic: capital flight, a collapsing currency, disrupted investment and a population that might leave rather than prepare. In a country whose war effort would soon depend upon social endurance as much as upon artillery, panic was not an abstract fear; it was a strategic risk. 

There was also a political dilemma: if Kyiv publicly embraced the most dire Western warnings, and the invasion did not occur immediately, Zelenskyy could be accused of manufacturing fear or serving foreign agendas. That would weaken him domestically and potentially fracture the very unity that would later become Ukraine’s decisive advantage. Ukraine therefore tried to square a circle: quiet military and civil preparations where possible, paired with public reassurance. Reporting since has suggested precisely that split-level approach—preparing discreetly while speaking calmly. 

A further constraint was structural. Mobilisation is not merely a military order; it is an administrative and economic act. It requires legal authorities, stockpiles, training capacity and the ability to absorb the immediate cost. A state can make these preparations over years. It is much harder to do so in weeks without harming the society one is trying to defend.

Why the West did not turn warning into an integrated plan

The West’s difficulty was different. It was not that she did not have the information. It was that she did not have a single political centre capable of turning information into aligned action at speed.

1. Credibility after Iraq—and the burden of proof

   
   

   Many European governments carried institutional trauma from the misuse or misrepresentation of intelligence before the Iraq War. Even accurate intelligence can be politically discounted when the memory of error is fresh. In early 2022 scepticism was not always pro-Russian; it was often anti-miscalculation. Leaders feared being pushed into irreversible steps—sanctions, evacuations, military deployments—on the basis of claims they could not independently verify. 

   
   

2. Divergent incentives inside the alliance

   
   

   Deterrence is collective. Costs are national. Some states were more exposed to immediate military risk; others were more exposed to energy shocks or domestic political backlash. The result was predictable fragmentation: agreement on condemnation without agreement on advance sacrifice. Even where allied rhetoric aligned, the appetite for painful preparatory measures varied sharply.

   
   

3. The legal and strategic constraints of not being at war

   
   

   NATO is a defensive alliance. Ukraine in 2022 was not within NATO. That legal fact matters because ‘a coherent plan to resist’ can easily imply pre-war military integration, forward deployment or overt security guarantees. Those steps would have been interpreted by Moscow as escalatory and by parts of the West as a pathway to direct conflict between nuclear-armed states. The alliance therefore leaned towards what she could justify politically and legally: intelligence sharing, training, limited pre-positioning, and the preparation of sanctions packages to be triggered after an invasion rather than before it. The NATO Secretary General’s statements on the day of invasion captured the hard boundary: solidarity and severe costs, yes; NATO fighting for Ukraine, no. 

   
   

4. A mismatch between the imagined war and the real one

   
   

   Many Western planners expected a rapid Russian success. That assumption, widely held in early assessments, made pre-invasion planning psychologically and politically harder: if Kyiv might fall quickly then bold measures risked appearing futile or recklessly provocative. The later surprise—that Ukraine could stop Russia at the gates of Kyiv—was, in part, a surprise because so many people had internalised Russia’s reputation rather than her actual competence. Reporting since has emphasised that Western intelligence was strong on the fact of invasion but weaker across the policy world on what would happen once it began. 

   
   

5. The intelligence–policy gap

   
   

   Intelligence can tell you what an adversary is likely to do. It cannot tell you what you are willing to pay to stop him. The West in early 2022 had not settled that question. Some governments hoped that threats of sanctions might still deter Moscow. Others hoped diplomacy could buy time. Others believed deterrence had already failed but feared the domestic cost of admitting it. In that environment, intelligence becomes fuel for argument rather than a trigger for action.

A darker truth: some ‘plans’ could only begin after the invasion

There is a final uncomfortable proposition. A truly coherent resistance plan may have been impossible without the invasion itself, because only the invasion could unify politics at the necessary level.

Inside Ukraine the invasion resolved the debate about whether this was coercion or conquest. It ended the political utility of downplaying the threat and turned survival into the organising principle of the state. In the West the invasion broke the taboo on unprecedented sanctions, transformed defence spending debates, and made large-scale military assistance to Ukraine politically saleable. The very unity that looks, in hindsight, like the obvious precondition for deterrence became feasible only once deterrence had failed.

That is not a counsel of fatalism. It is a reminder that democracies move fastest not when they are told, but when they are convinced. Early 2022 shows both the power and the limits of intelligence. It can forecast the storm. It cannot, by itself, make people board up the windows—especially when boarding up the windows has a cost, when the neighbours disagree about whether the storm is real, and when the last person who shouted ‘storm’ turned out to be wrong.

What should be learned

If the West wishes to do better next time, she needs three things.

First, a standing playbook that translates warning into pre-authorised measures: economic, informational, logistical and defensive. Waiting to improvise creates delay, and delay is what aggressors trade in.

Secondly, a more mature public language about uncertainty. ‘We assess’ is not weakness. It is honesty. The attempt to speak with absolute certainty—often demanded by politics—invites backlash when events do not unfold on schedule.

Thirdly, a recognition that resilience is the deterrent that cannot be faked. Ukraine resisted in 2022 not because the West finally found the perfect plan, but because Ukraine’s institutions, society and armed forces were more prepared than outsiders believed—and because, once attacked, she chose to fight as a nation rather than merely defend as a government. The tragedy is that much of this could not be proven in advance. It had to be demonstrated under fire.