Is deze al gepost? Achtergrond artikel van de Washington Post over de valse start van de Russen.
Long read, en deels al bekend, maar de moeite waard.
Washington Post: Russia’s spies misread Ukraine and misled Kremlin as war loomed
De invasie wordt een makkie:
In the final days before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s security service began sending cryptic instructions to informants in Kyiv. Pack up and get out of the capital, the Kremlin collaborators were told, but leave behind the keys to your homes.
The directions came from senior officers in a unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) with a prosaic name — the Department of Operational Information — but an ominous assignment: ensure the decapitation of the Ukrainian government and oversee the installation of a pro-Russian regime.
The messages were a measure of the confidence in that audacious plan. So certain were FSB operatives that they would soon control the levers of power in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian and Western security officials, that they spent the waning days before the war arranging safe houses or accommodations in informants’ apartments and other locations for the planned influx of personnel.
De Russische FSB heeft zitten slapen, of heeft niet eerlijk durven communiceren:
The FSB has spent decades spying on Ukraine, attempting to co-opt its institutions, paying off officials and working to impede any perceived drift toward the West. No aspect of the FSB’s intelligence mission outside Russia was more important than burrowing into all levels of Ukrainian society.
And yet, the agency failed to incapacitate Ukraine’s government, foment any semblance of a pro-Russian groundswell or interrupt President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hold on power. Its analysts either did not fathom how forcefully Ukraine would respond, Ukrainian and Western officials said, or did understand but couldn’t or wouldn’t convey such sober assessments to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Veel wishful thinking aan de Russische kant:
“The Russians were wrong by a mile,” said a senior U.S. official with regular access to classified intelligence on Russia and its security services. “They set up an entire war effort to seize strategic objectives that were beyond their means,” the official said. “Russia’s mistake was really fundamental and strategic.”
There are records that add to the mystery of Russian miscalculations. Extensive polls conducted for the FSB show that large segments of Ukraine’s population were prepared to resist Russian encroachment, and that any expectation that Russian forces would be greeted as liberators was unfounded. Even so, officials said, the FSB continued to feed the Kremlin rosy assessments that Ukraine’s masses would welcome the arrival of Russia’s military and the restoration of Moscow-friendly rule.
“There was plenty of wishful thinking in the GRU and the military, but it started with the FSB,” said a senior Western security official, using the GRU abbreviation for Russia’s main military intelligence agency. “The sense that there would be flowers strewn in their path — that was an FSB exercise.” He and other security officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
Adhering to these erroneous assumptions, officials said, the FSB championed a war plan premised on the idea that a lightning assault on Kyiv would topple the government in a matter of days. Zelensky would be dead, captured or in exile, creating a political vacuum for FSB agents to fill.
Instead, FSB operatives who at one point had reached the outskirts of Kyiv had to retreat alongside Russian forces.
Uiteraard hadden alle partijen moeite met de inschatting op voorhand:
Nearly every intelligence service with a stake in the war made consequential misjudgments.
U.S. spy agencies were prescient on Putin’s intentions but underestimated Ukraine’s ability to withstand the onslaught — an error that contributed to the United States’ initial hesitation to send heavy and sophisticated weapons.
Ukraine’s services appear to have read too much into signs that Russian forces were ill-prepared for full-scale combat, resisting Western warnings of an invasion that came within miles of the capital.
Russia’s intelligence breakdowns in Ukraine seem more systemic, its work marred by unreliable sources, disincentives to deliver hard truths to the Kremlin, and an endemic bias that matched Putin’s contemptuous attitude toward the country.
The FSB fueled this dynamic, officials said, with assessments packaged to please the Kremlin and with sources who had their own reasons — political and financial — for encouraging a Russian takedown of the Kyiv government.
Enzovoorts.
/u/127/chimera.png?f=community)
/u/18075/crop5db023aa710a8_cropped.png?f=community)
:strip_exif()/u/38542/Scrat1ani.gif?f=community)
/u/98444/Gear24.GIF?f=community)
:fill(white):strip_exif()/f/image/PHTLu008eTRyErq3KZ7bKrKi.png?f=user_large)
bron: :strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/170519/crop57517e4714513_cropped.jpeg?f=community)
:strip_exif()/u/8437/crop62ffca5246d8b.gif?f=community)
/u/284549/crop5c8c1d3ca48d4.png?f=community)
:fill(white):strip_exif()/f/image/z2VgYZant7G20GHnFvirYagT.png?f=user_large)
:fill(white):strip_exif()/f/image/nLIiK8CTvL07MdAZtuA0NUcI.png?f=user_large)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/148860/crop68bfec7708736_cropped.jpg?f=community)
/u/208006/Zagor%2520small.JPG?f=community)
/u/42776/crop6501d346786db_cropped.png?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/81921/back_front_s_small.jpg?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/23872/Y2.jpg?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/123426/anti-ipod-.jpg?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/111904/Untitled-1.jpg?f=community)
/u/46804/crop5f989efcbb253.png?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/357512/photo.jpg?f=community)
/u/182905/bulle-bas.png?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/30300/crop649b06535e901_cropped.jpg?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/202430/458684_q.jpg?f=community)
/u/62205/crop5db2de62da599_cropped.png?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/285051/teaglass_tweakers.jpg?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/178794/Iron_Maiden_klein.jpg?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/106218/wc-backbone.jpg?f=community)
:strip_exif()/u/23102/anandus.gif?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/306017/avatar22956_6.jpg?f=community){kind=avatar}
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/296584/crop5cb62c7c8736c_cropped.jpeg?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/44113/tux.jpg?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/84176/crop577a4401d15ce_cropped.jpeg?f=community)
/u/293532/crop602d26dcd0ef0_cropped.png?f=community)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/174878/SCKnightMicro.jpg?f=community)
/u/217510/crop660db19c1cf7b_cropped.png?f=community)
Dit topic is gesloten.