A War Foretold
How the CIA and MI6 pieced together the invasion plan
Date episode published: 21-Feb-26
A War Foretold - And Still Ignored. Four years ago, Europe woke up to missile trails over Kyiv and the lie many had been telling themselves: “Putin won’t do it.” That’s not just the public, but also experts, historians, politicians and diplomats. Today, The Guardian publishes a deeply sourced reconstruction of the months before 24 February 2022 - how the CIA and MI6 pieced together the invasion plan, why much of Europe didn’t buy it, and why Kyiv didn’t want to hear it. (The Guardian) The piece was authored by journalist Shaun Walker.
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In November 2021, CIA Director William Burns tries to see Putin in person - but gets a phone call instead. Burns tells Putin the US believes Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine; Putin shrugs it off and pivots to his own grievances. Burns comes away convinced war is coming. (The Guardian)
Burns later recalls Biden pressing him for a yes/no answer - and Burns says: “Yes.” (The Guardian)
What did the intelligence look like, that let to this simply devastating answer?
The reporting suggests a mosaic: satellite imagery, signals intercepts, corroborating threads from multiple directions - enough that Washington set up a cross-agency “tiger team” to run worst-case scenarios. (The Guardian)
And the core assessment was expansive and got the broad sweep of the invasion correct. That this wouldn’t be a limited Donbas escalation - but a full-scale assault, with regime change as the goal. (The Guardian)
So why didn’t Europe believe it? The Guardian puts a spotlight on a ghost that still haunts western intelligence politics: Iraq 2003. The “dodgy dossier” trauma didn’t just make people sceptical - it made them structurally resistant to US certainty, especially when sources couldn’t be fully exposed. (The Guardian) And especially when the reality the intelligence points to seems so implausible, so impossible, so inappropriate for the 21st century.
A former European foreign minister recalls telling Antony Blinken, in effect: I remember 2003, and I believed you then. (The Guardian)
And analysts watching the piece land this week are seizing on that dynamic. Political geographer Klaus Dodds highlights the “shadow of 2003”, plus classic cognitive failures - wishful thinking, confirmation bias, the comfort of assuming Putin is “rational” in the way we define rational. (LinkedIn)
But the intelligence was also met with doubt in Kyiv. This is where it gets painful, and where The Guardian reporting is blunt: Zelenskyy’s political leadership spent months dismissing increasingly urgent US warnings as “scaremongering.” (The Guardian)
But the article also explains the logic: Zelenskyy feared that public alarm would detonate Ukraine’s economy and stability - collapsing the country without Russia firing a shot. There are well-founded and entirely rational fears, that created an impossible dilemma for Ukraine’s leadership. (The Guardian)
At one point, the story says Zelenskyy even dispatched a senior security official to a European capital with a message via intelligence channels: the war scare is fake - a US pressure play. (The Guardian)
You end up with a triangle of failure:
US/UK: unusually detailed warning, but limited ability to compel action beyond briefings and selective declassification. (The Guardian)
Europe: sceptical, burned by Iraq, psychologically anchored to “this can’t happen in 21st-century Europe.” (The Guardian)
Ukraine’s political leadership: afraid of panic, slow to accept the scale - while some security actors quietly clocked the signs. (The Guardian)
And then: 24 February 2022. Here’s the hardest question, and it’s the one the Guardian piece forces back onto the table: What preparation was possible - and what was lost - because the warnings were underplayed, contested, or politically inconvenient? (The Guardian)
The reporting makes clear there’s an active argument inside Ukraine even now, and it’s not clean. On one side: the case for earlier mobilisation and legal readiness. The Guardian quotes Valerii Zaluzhnyi - then Ukraine’s top military commander - saying: “Martial law should have been introduced in January, or in February at the latest.” (The Guardian)
That is a direct claim of preventable cost at the start of the invasion. (The Guardian)
On the other side: the argument that too much warning could have broken the country’s spine before the first missile struck. A Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) general is quoted arguing that if Zelenskyy had publicly sounded the alarm, “millions would have fled” - and “the country would most likely have fallen.” This would have occurred before martial law could have been declared, or the borders blocked to the mobilisation age male population. (The Guardian)
The counterfactual is brutal either way: warn loudly, risk panic and flight; warn quietly, risk being caught unready. But were preparations for invasion been taking place ‘quietly’ behind the scenes? This will likely be the focal point of future debate and judgement.
But beyond mobilisation, there’s another layer: deterrence. One reaction to the Guardian piece - surfacing in the discussion around the author, Shaun Walker’s own post - is a sharp critique that “warning” isn’t “deterring.” That view argues the West may have understood the threat yet failed to arm Ukraine fast enough or credibly signal consequences early enough to change Putin’s calculus. (LinkedIn)
That debate matters because it’s not historical trivia. It’s potentially important for the next crisis. The next time Russia attacks a neighbour or adversary.
Then there’s the second intelligence failure that the Guardian emphasises: even the services that got the invasion right misread the war’s early trajectory. They expected a swift Russian takeover, assumed Kyiv might fall, and underestimated Ukraine’s capacity to resist. (The Guardian) Not every expert thought that, but enough did to swing opinion behind that assumption. The idea of Russian ‘inevitability’ has a long and dangerous pedigree.
The piece quotes analyst Michael Kofman on that double miscalculation - overestimating Russia and underestimating Ukraine. (The Guardian)
A German outlet summarising the investigation makes the same point: CIA and MI6 were right on whether - but not on how it would go. (t-online)
And the Guardian’s lesson isn’t subtle: the most dangerous failures aren’t always about missing data. They’re about rejecting reality because it violates your mental model of what’s “reasonable.” (The Guardian)
Intelligence historian Huw Dylan puts it in institutional terms: scepticism is safer for your career, because predicting catastrophe and being wrong has consequences. (The Guardian)
A German official, in the piece, boils the institutional takeaway down to one line: Europe must work with worst-case scenarios more than it did. And the best-case ones too. (The Guardian)
The Guardian calls it A War Foretold. And that title should make you angry - because foretold is not the same as prevented. Inaction becomes even more egregious, given the background of correct prediction of a full-scale invasion. (The Guardian)
The question for 2026 is not “who should have listened?” But what should they have done. What could have been done 1) to deter Russia and make it clear that any attempt at an invasion would be forcefully resisted 2) spell out the clear consequences of the invasion to Russia, and indeed define what those consequences would be 3) arm Ukraine to the maximum to smash the predicted invasion, and stop it in its tracks.
Then there’s the question of how to predict, deter and prepare for Russian next invasion. We need to ask, what are we dismissing right now because it feels too irrational, too costly, too politically inconvenient - until the rockets arrive, the drones buzz overhead and we all pretend we were shocked, and ask dumbly, “who could have predicted this?” (The Guardian)
Excellent reporting