As Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, few observers (extremely few outside Ukraine itself, I venture to say) foresaw any result other than a quick Russian victory. The United States hastily evacuated its embassy from Kiev to Lviv, 300 miles to the west. President Biden offered to take President Zelensky to safety, too, foreseeing that he might preside over a government in exile while Tsar Vladimir’s toadies gained control of his homeland.
Matters turned out differently. I am reminded of what Winston Churchill said about the French government’s decision to surrender to Hitler. “When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, [the French] generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, ‘In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.’ Some chicken; some neck.”
Writing for Geopolitical Monitor, Taras Kuzio, a Canadian-based British-Ukrainian scholar, has probed “why Western experts exaggerated the strength of the Russian army and underplayed Ukraine militarily and as a resilient society”. His essay is long, and much of it recounts the opinions of Ukraine’s pre-war detractors. For instance:
Watling and Reynolds writing ‘The Plot to Destroy Ukraine’ for RUSI, published nine days before the invasion, outlined a large list of victories Russia would score in the event of an invasion – none of which have actually come about. They described Ukraine as corrupt, badly divided, with ‘widespread penetration’ of Ukrainian politics and government by Russian intelligence agents. In the opening phase of the war, they wrote that Russia would destroy Ukraine’s defense, command-and-control, and other military installations. Ukraine’s best armed forces were in the Donbas and because of Russia’s advantage in artillery, armor, and aircraft, Watling and Reynolds claimed the invasion would ‘likely lead to the rapid overrunning of Ukrainian conventional units’ with Kyiv ‘enveloped within days.’
What Professor Kuzio sees as the root of such failed prognostications is summed up succinctly:
Western experts got the Russian military and Ukrainian resilience wrong because of the way post-communist studies is structured in universities and think tanks. Western experts continue to believe they are experts on both Russia and the remainder of the USSR. In no other region of the world is this the case. An expert on Argentina, for example, is not an expert on Latin America and an expert on Japan is not an expert on East Asia. Experts on Russia believe they are also possessing expertise about Ukraine and other non-Russian republics of the former USSR. This is especially true since 2014 when the number of Ukraine experts expanded many fold.
Russian experts and scholars have therefore tended to look at Ukraine through the eyes of Moscow. Western media outlets and companies were nearly always headquartered in Moscow – as in the USSR – and their journalists and employees rarely traveled to Ukraine. [Orysia] Lusevych writes that this led to: ‘At best, Ukraine was viewed as being, well, like Russia; but maybe worse. It was seen as unstable, prone to uprisings and at the mercy of its oligarchs – more corrupt, more divided, more troubled than the behemoth next door. And because it was viewed as a weak state it was assumed that Ukraine was doomed to collapse in the face of a Russian invasion.’ Western experts on Russia have always been reluctant to use sources of information from Ukraine and Ukrainian opinion polls, which I described as academic orientalism in my 2020 book entitled Crisis in Russian Studies?
Western experts exaggerated Russian military power, downplayed Ukrainian military power, ignored corruption in the Russian military, believed fairy tales about Russian military reforms, exaggerated regional divisions and under-estimated national cohesion in Ukraine. Western military reforms in Ukraine since 2014 were ignored. Meanwhile, changes in identity since 2014, the factors behind the failure of Putin’s New Russia project in 2014 and the loyalty of Ukraine’s Russian speakers were not considered.
It might help, of course, if a large segment of America’s “Russia experts” didn’t despise their own country and favor its withdrawal from world affairs.
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