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‘Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington Realized

Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine
A first-ever oral history of how top U.S. and Western officials saw the warning signs of a European land war, their

frantic attempts to stop it — and the moment Putin actually crossed the border.

Illustrations by Nazario Graziano for POLITICO; Photos by AP, Getty Images, iStock

By ERIN BANCO, GARRETT M. G R A F F, LARA SELIGMAN, NAHAL TOOSI and ALEXANDER WARD

02/24/2023 12:01 AM EST

This oral history was compiled and woven together by writer and historian
GARRETT M. GRAFF , based on dozens of hours of interviews by POLITICO
national security reporters ERIN BANCO, LARA SELIGMAN, NAHAL TOOSI and
ALEXANDER WARD with more than 30 key figures of the U.S. government and
Western allied response. (Additional interviews were contributed by Jack
Blanchard, Graff and Maggie Miller.)

T
he Russian invasion of Ukraine exactly a year ago was as shocking as
it was clearly foreseen. The merciless bombardment of Ukrainian
cities, the hundreds of thousands of troops and scores of tanks that
rumbled across the border on Feb. 24, 2022, followed months of rising tension
and concern, and provided perhaps the biggest foreign policy test yet for the
Biden administration.

For nearly a year prior, U.S. and Western officials had signs of what was
coming: a suspicious buildup of Russian troops, intelligence about the
Kremlin’s plans, statements from President Vladimir Putin himself. Those
officials raised increasingly specific public alarms, some of which were based
on a novel new strategy of rapidly declassifying and publicizing intelligence in
near real-time, and made desperate attempts to avert a war, even as it became
more and more clear that Putin was determined to invade.

The events in eastern Europe in 2021 and 2022, coming just as the world
emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic, also unfolded against a fraught
geopolitical backdrop: In 2014, Russia had already seized Crimea from
Ukraine, and fighting by Russia’s irregular, unmarked troops, known as “little
green men,” had destabilized eastern Ukraine and led to a long-running, low-
level war that had continued ever since. Meanwhile, during the summer of
2021, the United States faced its own challenge: a chaotic and controversial end
to its nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan.

This is the story of the Biden administration’s strategy and reaction to that
looming Russian invasion — the battle to persuade skeptics and rally foreign
allies to confront an almost-unthinkable threat, one that continues to shake the
world today. All titles and military ranks are presented based on roles the
speakers held in February 2022, and interviews have been condensed and
edited for clarity.
 I . THE BUILDUP ON THE B OR DER

‘SOMETHING WAS BADLY

WRONG’
S P R I N G – FA L L 2 0 2 1
LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER , director, Defense Intelligence Agency: DIA is
supposed to be the master sense-makers of militaries around the world — how
they’re organized, trained, equipped, where they are, why they fight, when they
would fight, what their doctrine is and what their leaders are all about. I’ve
been thinking about the Russians for a very long time. The national defense
strategy said, “Hey, the pacing threat is China, but Russia is this acute threat
out there.” I always had that in the back of my mind — Russia is potentially
very, very dangerous.

JON FINER , deputy national security adviser, National Security Council, White
House: In the spring of 2021, we started to see a concerning buildup of Russian
forces on the border with Ukraine.

AVRIL HAINES , director of National Intelligence: In that April-March period,

I’d seen it build up. There was definitely a moment where I recognized that this
is not just a force buildup for diplomatic effect. Putin is clearly considering
military action on some level. At that point, the only military action that
seemed plausible was a much smaller incursion.

JAKE SULLIVAN , national security adviser, White House: That was deeply
alarming, because it was out of historical norms. There was no other credible
explanation for what they were up to.

JON FINER: For obvious reasons, given the history of 2014, given the conflict
that had been going on ever since, it raised real concerns about their intention.

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE , director, National Security Agency, and commander,

U.S. Cyber Command: We knew they weren’t going to invade in April 2021.
Why do we know it was an exercise? Because the U.S. intelligence community
really knows when Russia conducts exercises, and it was an exercise.

JAKE SULLIVAN: Part of the motivating impulse for making the proposal for the
summit in Geneva [in June 2021] was to try to create an alternative path that
would involve Russia deescalating around Ukraine and us trying to inject some
stability — not just into the U.S.-Russia relationship, but stability into the
broader Ukraine situation. When President Biden met with President Putin in
Geneva, obviously the top story around that visit was the ransomware attacks
and cyber, but a healthy amount of the discussion behind closed doors was
about Ukraine.
President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet during the U.S.-Russia summit in Geneva, Switzerland

on June 16, 2021. | Pool photo by Peter Klaunzer

JON FINER: There was a period leading into that summit and immediately after
in which the Russians appeared to draw some forces back.

EMILY HORNE , spokesperson, National Security Council, White House: That

immediate crisis turned out to be diffusible.

AVRIL HAINES: A variety of things took place that brought everybody’s

temperature down.

EMILY HORNE: There was a sense of “This is not over yet” as we were leaving
Geneva. Did we think that there would be war in Europe in the next six months
when we left that meeting? No, I don’t think anybody would have predicted
that on the plane ride home. But very quickly after that meeting, Putin came
out with his manifesto.

JAKE SULLIVAN: Over the summer, Putin published a long article about
Ukraine. His rhetoric began to change quite markedly in public. At that point,
our antenna went up higher. Something was shifting in his mindset.

“Over the summer, Putin published

a long article about Ukraine. His
rhetoric began to change quite
markedly in public.”
—JA K E S U L L I VA N

ANTONY BLINKEN , U.S. secretary of State: The storm clouds were starting to
gather many months before the invasion.

AVRIL HAINES: Then we were starting to see this new buildup.

DAME KAREN PIERCE , British ambassador to the U.S., Washington: Something

was badly wrong.
GEN. MARK MILLEY , chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pentagon: We’re out of
Afghanistan by 31 August, and there was a planned Russian exercise called
Zapad, and they started marshaling the troops for the exercise in the
September time frame. Right about then we realized this is odd; it was much
bigger in scale and scope than the previous year’s exercise.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH , director of Intelligence (J-2), Joint Staff,

Pentagon: Some of the intelligence became quite compelling.

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: You have a bunch of analysts here who are specialists
in military intelligence — this is what they do. Their happy spot is doing
assessments on order of battle and many other things. When you see the
amount of stuff that the Russians moved towards the Ukraine, and when they
did that, that’s a pretty significant tell.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: In September, they came to me with this map, and laid it
out on my table; they explained, this was different, sir, this looks different, this
is bigger in size and scale and scope, the disposition, composition of the force,
etc. We talked for maybe an hour. I gave them a bunch of questions — next day
they come back. They drilled down in a lot of detail. I say, “OK, let’s see what
the rest of the intel community has to say.”
Scenes from the Zapad strategic exercise in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia in September 2021, which was

carried out by Russian and Belarusian armed forces. The size of the exercise gave U.S. intelligence leaders reason to

believe that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine. | Vadim Savitskiy/Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP

BILL BURNS , director, Central Intelligence Agency: We had begun to see across
the U.S. intelligence community, including CIA, what were unmistakable signs
of a serious Russian buildup along Ukraine’s borders, and picking up
intelligence that they’re planning for what seemed to be a major new invasion
of Ukraine.

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: It looks very, very dark for the Ukrainians.

ERIC GREEN , senior director for Russia and Central Asia, National Security
Council, White House: I was struck by the confidence and clarity that the IC
[intelligence community] had in this assessment. The alarm bells definitely
went off.

DALEEP SINGH , deputy national security adviser for international economics,

National Security Council, White House: We thought we had quelled his
appetite for territory by meeting him in Geneva and trying to address some of
the strategic concerns he’d been raising, but then here we were again, with an
even larger force.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: It took about a week or two to put together this picture of a
really significant, sizable Russian force. Then I said, “OK, we need to brief
SecDef.” We didn’t say it was an invasion yet. We just knew it was different.

ANTONY BLINKEN: We saw not only the massing of forces on the borders of
Ukraine, we also — through the information that we got — had an
understanding of what the Russian leadership was actually thinking and
planning for those forces.

LAURA COOPER , deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russian, Ukrainian

and Eurasian affairs, Pentagon: We were reading intelligence that convinced
us of Russia’s motives — to significantly destabilize Ukraine, and then
ultimately to invade Ukraine.
AVRIL HAINES: We were pulling together the strings and constantly in that
mode: “OK, but could this be interpreted from a different perspective? Is there
another way to think about this?”

GEN. MARK MILLEY: We set up to brief the president. We briefed in the Oval,
and it’s a very serious, very somber brief. There’s this many Russian forces,
this is the size, this is what the capability is, this is their composition, this is
the disposition. This is the size of the Ukrainian forces. We went over what the
Russians’ most likely and most dangerous courses of action are. It certainly
grabs everyone’s attention.

AVRIL HAINES: It was hard to believe, at first, honestly. Most people said,
“Really? A large-scale military option? That seems unlikely!”

“It was hard to believe, at first,

honestly. Most people said, ‘Really?
A large-scale military option? That
seems unlikely!’”
—AV R I L H A I N E S

GEN. MARK MILLEY: When someone like me is saying, “Hey, this is the most
dangerous course of action — you’re probably going to see five field armies
coming this way, two over here, and five over there. It’s going to be preceded by
a significant amount of Russian bombings and missile attacks, and this is going
to be the most horrific combat operations since the end of World War II.”
People are sitting there going “What planet did this guy just walk in from?” I
can understand that, actually.

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE: By the 11th of October, I’m convinced the Russians are
going to invade Ukraine. The preponderance of intelligence was different than
anything we’d ever seen before.
DAME KAREN PIERCE: A few people in our system — because of the [April] 2021
[buildup] not coming to anything — thought this was saber rattling, but not for
very long. It didn’t take too long for the whole U.K. system to think this would
be an invasion. We thought it would take the form either of an air assault on
Kyiv or an assassination of the leadership — or possibly both.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: We end up briefing [President Biden] frequently

throughout the fall because this thing keeps getting bigger and bigger and
bigger in size and scope.

LIZ TRUSS , foreign secretary, United Kingdom: The threats clearly became
worse through the autumn.

ANTONY BLINKEN: That began an incredibly intense period of engaging the

world, as well as engaging with the Russians, to try to prevent them from doing
what we saw building, and with the rest of the world to warn them about what
was coming.

EMILY HORNE: There were three priorities early on: Support Ukraine — nothing
about Ukraine without Ukraine, bolster NATO and avoid a war with Russia.

ANNE NEUBERGER , deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging
technology, National Security Council, White House: This was really a coming-
of-age for our cyber community — we never before mobilized like this for a
geopolitical crisis. It reflects the extent to which cyber was now a mainstream
national security issue. The White House had three major lines of effort [on the
cyber side]: We mobilized to provide a range of assistance to the Ukrainians,
we mobilized with the international community, and we really mobilized across
the U.S. government and the private sector in a way we never did before.

JON FINER: It’s a very rare thing in international affairs that you get such a
clear, unmistakable and advanced warning of a major geopolitical event. More
often, they just happen and you’re forced to scramble and respond and react.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: It’s 30 days after the exit from Afghanistan. Some people
said that the invasion of Ukraine was a result of the withdrawal. I don’t agree.
It’s obvious the invasion was planned before the fall of Afghanistan.

JAKE SULLIVAN: Looking back over the course of 2021, it seems clear that
[Putin] was toying with the idea all the way through, and he was getting more
and more agitated about the future course of Ukraine. He didn’t wake up one
day in September-October and decide to do this. The footsteps were there.

II: PR EPAR ING FOR THE WO RST

‘I DON’T THINK ANY OF US

WANTED TO BELIEVE.’
O C T O B E R - N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 1

JAKE SULLIVAN: [The buildup] led us to do two things in October — one, to

have the president send Bill Burns to Moscow to engage the Russians directly
and to have the president make this a major topic of conversation with key
allies at the G-20 in Rome.

DALEEP SINGH: It was tense because Russia was part of the G-20. Putin didn’t
show up. [Russian Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov did. In the general session,
I remember very clearly sitting behind President Biden, and he was reflecting
on the historical moment. “We’re at this inflection point, history is going to
judge whether democracies could come together and defend core principles
that underpin peace and security.” He was looking right at Lavrov when he said
that, and he said defending freedom is not costless.

ANTONY BLINKEN: There was a meeting on the margins of the G-20, in Italy,
when President Biden convened the French, German and U.K. leaders. We
shared with those leaders in some detail the information we had about what
Russia was planning. That was maybe the most significant early wake-up call
moment.
JAKE SULLIVAN: Coming back from Rome, I realized that we were looking at a
matter of weeks, not months or years. We needed to get ourselves organized as
a government. I instituted a daily meeting here at the NSC, with a significant
number of senior people at the NSC who covered everything from the military
to sanctions to diplomacy to intelligence, so that we could organize a whole-of-
government response and whole-of-alliance response to what Russia was
doing.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (top) traveled to Rome at the end of October 2021 to attend the G-20 Summit in

Putin's place. During the summit, Biden met with Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel (bottom) to

share intelligence about Russia's plans. | Pavel Bednyakov/Sputnik via AP and Evan Vucci/AP Photo

ERIC GREEN: [Jake Sullivan’s] office isn’t massive, but he has a table with eight
or 10 chairs, then some easy chairs and a couch. The meetings would be from a
half-dozen to 15 people depending on the issue set, all very informal.

JAKE SULLIVAN: I was determined not to have regrets if the worst came to pass
— I was determined to ensure that we had done everything we possibly could
think up to first try to head this off, and if we couldn’t put it off, put ourselves
the Western world and Ukraine in the best possible position to deal with it, and
to put Russia in the worst possible position to succeed. That was my motivation
every single day through November, December, January, February. That was
the North Star.

BILL BURNS: The trip the president asked me to take to Moscow at the
beginning of November was to lay out in an unusual amount of detail exactly
why we were concerned that Putin was preparing for a major new invasion, and
then to be very clear about what the consequences would be should Putin
choose to execute that plan. I had a bad feeling going out on that trip about
what was coming. That was only reinforced by the conversations I had there.

MICHAEL CARPENTER , U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and

Co-operation in Europe, Vienna: When you’ve spent your entire adult career
working on Russia, there is a distinction between the plausibility of something
and the shocking nature of something that is so epic in its proportions that you
know it’s going to shape your career and world politics for years to come.

When I saw this information about Russia’s imminent attack for the first time,
it did seem plausible, but it was also deeply, deeply shocking — it would be
history changing. That was the horror of it all. Any large-scale Russian war
against Ukraine was going to be a human and humanitarian tragedy.
 “It would be history changing. That
was the horror of it all.”
—MICHAEL CARPENTER

BILL BURNS: [While I was in Moscow,] I was talking to [Putin] on a secure

phone. It was a strange conversation. He was in Sochi — this was the height of
yet another wave of Covid, Moscow itself was under a curfew — so he was
isolating himself. The conversation was pretty straightforward. I laid out what
the president had asked me to lay out to him. His response was a lot of what I
had heard before from him about his convictions about Ukraine, and in many
ways, his cockiness about Russia’s ability to enforce its will on Ukraine. His
senior advisers were pretty consistent as well. Not all of them were intimately
familiar with his own decision-making, so at least one or two of them were a
little bit surprised with what I laid out to them because the circle of advisers
had gotten so small.

ERIC GREEN: The Russian interlocutors — they didn’t seem fully read into what
was going to happen.

BILL BURNS: I came away with a very strong impression that Putin had just
about made up his mind to go to war.

JOHN KIRBY , assistant to the secretary of Defense for public affairs, Pentagon:
That trip went a long way to convincing us that this was a no-kidding invasion.

EMILY HORNE: I am no Kremlinologist, but one thing that has struck me

throughout this process — and certainly struck me throughout the fall of ’21 —
is that a lot of the times Putin and Russia were saying very plainly what their
intentions were and what they wanted to do. And the West often had a very
difficult time understanding that and hearing that. He made the case for what
ultimately transpired very clearly in that manifesto in the summer of ’21.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-S.C.): The big thing that was clear to me was that
after we basically gave him Crimea after the 2014 invasion — Putin was allowed
to stay in occupation of these territories — his goal was always the same. The
rhetoric coming from Putin was very escalatory, setting the conditions for
toppling the government in Kyiv because there were Nazis, making the
argument they’re defending Mother Russia against the NATO puppet
aggressor, all the rhetoric to the domestic audience to justify the invasion. The
invasion of Crimea made him believe that we would do nothing.

DAME KAREN PIERCE: He had said so much that it did not seem possible he
would or could back down, which was unusual because normally Putin leaves
himself wiggle room.

AVRIL HAINES: There were things that really made this a much more
compelling case — budget decisions that were taken, other forms of intelligence
surrounding it, the information campaign that they were playing. It wasn’t
until you brought it all together, you start to see how the picture pulls together.
Then the second piece was, “OK, I still don’t understand why would he make
this decision?” It seems self-defeating. The analysts really put together that
picture that helped us to see [his reasoning] more effectively.

BILL BURNS: My own impression, based on interactions with him over the
years, was a lot of this had to do with his own fixation on controlling Ukraine.
He was convincing himself that strategically the window was closing on his
opportunity to control Ukraine.

AVRIL HAINES: He saw Ukraine inexorably moving towards the West and
towards NATO and away from Russia.

BILL BURNS: His conviction was that without controlling Ukraine and its
choices, it’s not possible for Russia to be a great power and have this sphere of
influence that he believes is essential. And it’s not possible for him to be a great
Russian leader without accomplishing that.

AVRIL HAINES: He saw the Ukrainian military becoming significantly stronger.

BILL BURNS: Tactically Putin saw the winter of ’21 and ’22 as a favorable
landscape — he said as much when I talked to him.

AVRIL HAINES: He saw Angela Merkel leaving the picture; Emmanuel Macron
distracted by an election.

BILL BURNS: He thought that the Europeans were distracted.

AVRIL HAINES: He recognized that in this cold winter, energy prices would be
high, making it harder for Europe to pull together. Will the coalition be capable
of enacting the kinds of sanctions that would create concern?

BILL BURNS: He was also quite skeptical of what our reaction would be as well.

AVRIL HAINES: He saw all of these things.

BILL BURNS: He was wrong on all of those assumptions — profoundly wrong.

AVRIL HAINES: And if you were looking at it through the lens of somebody who
perceived Ukraine moving away from Russia as being something that you had
to stop at all costs, you could begin to see how it wasn’t going to get any easier
over time.

BILL BURNS: On the plane ride back, I called President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy
at the president’s request just to describe the conversation. He listened very
carefully. I think he was quite sobered.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during the COP26 opening ceremony in Glasgow, Scotland on Nov. 1,

2021. | Pool photo by Andy Buchanan

TOM SULLIVAN , deputy chief of staff for policy, Department of State: We were
at the COP in Glasgow [on November 2] and met with President Zelenskyy —
the secretary had to brief him on our intelligence that we had strong
indications that Russia was preparing for a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

ANTONY BLINKEN: The two of us, sitting almost knee-to-knee in a room on the
margins of the summit meeting. It was very stark, very palpable. He took the
information very stoically.

TOM SULLIVAN: They were clearly struck by how candid our assessment was.
That was notable.

ANTONY BLINKEN: [That was] one of the most powerful moments for me.

LAURA COOPER: As far back as November, we were gearing up in a significant

way to make sure we were monitoring the situation incredibly closely,
understanding the intelligence, gearing up to support Ukraine and reinforce
our allies. Secretary [Lloyd] Austin put us on a vigorous battle rhythm — we
were providing updates every single morning, at first it was by 7:30 a.m., and
then it was by 6:30.

AMB. MICHAEL CARPENTER: I remember arriving in Vienna in late November of

2021, and most of my colleagues were talking about the quote unquote
deliverables for the ministerial [OSCE’s decision-making body]. I remember
being incredulous that this was what most people here at the organization were
talking about, because all I wanted to talk about was the risk of a full-blown
war in Europe that could be weeks away. It all seemed surreal — not that
climate change isn’t crucially important for all of us, but it seemed we were on
the precipice of this massive geopolitical catastrophe. There weren’t enough
people convinced of the gravity.

JAKE SULLIVAN: I was working in the White House when Crimea unfolded and
the “little green men,” the early hours of confusion and fog of war. We had the
benefit of being able to learn from that experience — to learn from the
experience of the initial invasion into the Donbas in 2014, to really study the
Russian playbook going as far back as Georgia. We have the benefit of the early
warning of the intelligence, to make sure that we would not be caught on our
back foot, but rather we’d be on our front foot — and pushing Russia in the
information space onto their back foot.

VICTORIA NULAND , under secretary for political affairs, Department of State:

Because I had seen our best efforts to forestall a violent choice by Putin fail in
’14, I was more prepared than many for the fact that he would do it again this
time.

AVRIL HAINES: We were increasingly accumulating a picture that made clear:

“Yes, this was a real option that they were considering,” and as we were helping
the policy community understand that, the Boss was saying, “OK, Tony, Jake,
you guys, you need to go out there, and start talking to our partners and allies.
We need to see if there’s any opportunity for us to shape what might happen.”

GEN. MARK MILLEY: There’s a series of briefings that we have with our NATO
allies all through the fall. DNI Haines, Director Burns and myself all talking
with our counterparts to be able to set that context.

AVRIL HAINES: What I remember before the NATO engagement [in November]
was them coming back and saying to the Boss: “They’re really skeptical,” like,
“We’re going out there, and they don’t think that Putin is going to invade,” and
him turning around and saying, “OK, you need to get out there. We need to
start sharing intelligence and you have got to help them see that this is a
plausible possibility, because that’s what’s going to help us to engage them in a
way that allows us to start planning.”

VICTORIA NULAND: Everybody at the beginning was relatively skeptical — with

the exception of the Canadians and the U.K., who were seeing the same
intelligence that we were seeing because they’re Five Eyes — that he would
actually take this step.

LT. GEN. SCOTT BERRIER: The Five Eyes is the oldest intelligence collaboration
network that we have — we have very close partners with Canada, Australia,
Great Britain and New Zealand. We also wanted to reach out to other
traditional partners — France, Germany, other members of NATO. A portion of
that was about convincing them of the intelligence we had and what we
thought. In other cases, it was more collaboration on the intelligence they had
and what they saw.

LIZ TRUSS: We were sitting on very serious, good intelligence, but — for
whatever reason — that wasn’t necessarily the shared view of what was going to
happen. Our allies had a different view.

DAME KAREN PIERCE: We knew that the French and Germans had the same
reports that we had. We were puzzled by their insistence that he would not
invade. When I asked the Germans, they said they wanted to keep an open
mind. Scholz has said it — they just were wrong. They hoped for the best.

JOHN SULLIVAN , U.S. ambassador to Russia, Moscow: People had a hard time
believing that there was going to be a major land war in Europe. “Yeah, maybe
it’ll be like 2014-15 — there’ll be some ‘little green men,’ and there’ll be a minor
incursion here, etc.” I was saying: “No. What they’re massing is not what
happened in 2014-15. This is a World War II-style, or 1968 Warsaw Pact
invasion of Czechoslovakia-style military operation.” That’s what they had
trouble wrapping their minds around.

LIZ TRUSS: I don’t think any of us wanted to believe.

JAKE SULLIVAN: I was very understanding, because an invasion of this

magnitude was out of character for Putin, who had specialized in more hybrid,
more limited military operations. It was something with grave consequences
for the security of Europe and so hard to immediately wrap one’s mind around.

JON FINER: It was, in many ways, a highly illogical and irrational thing for [the
Russians] to do for all the reasons that have played out ever since and in the
enormous cost that they have paid for, frankly, very little military gain.

AMB. MICHAEL CARPENTER: Did he really think he could occupy all of Ukraine?
It still seems incredible today he could think he could achieve an occupation of
a country of 44 million people, with whom he was at war for many, many years,
who had no love lost for Russia. We were warning Russia both publicly and
privately that if it invaded Ukraine that it would be a massive strategic
miscalculation, using exactly those words.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH: Wherever we went, I’ve got a book that has the
“Big Green Map” in it.

AMANDA SLOAT , senior director for Europe, National Security Council, White
House: That map has taken on mythical status.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH: I don’t go anywhere without it; the chairman
wouldn’t go anywhere without it. The map — even though it’s two-dimensional
— becomes a great source of intelligence fusion, the prop you need analytically
to tell the tale.

JOHN KIRBY: It was a classic military topographical map — it showed a general

sense of the topography of Ukraine, particularly those areas where we knew
operations were going to be conducted, and it gave us a working-level
knowledge every day of where the positions were, where the major units were,
what kind of units they were, where and when they were moving. It was
updated routinely to reflect the battlefield positions.

AMANDA SLOAT: The map was generally brought out in Principals Committee
meetings, spread out on the table, and then taken away. It was used in the Oval
Office for briefings with the president. I never got an up-and-close look,
because it was whisked in and out, but it speaks to the degree to which people
wanted to understand the details of how this was going to play out.

“We didn’t want to inadvertently

speed up the Russian clock,
incentivize Putin, or give him a
pretext to make a decision he had
not made.”
 —COLIN KAHL

COLIN KAHL , under secretary of Defense for policy, Pentagon: There were
debates in the fall about how much support was required, because we didn’t
want to inadvertently speed up the Russian clock, incentivize Putin, or give him
a pretext to make a decision he had not made. Us leaning too far forward could
create dynamics either within the alliance or as we were trying to build world
opinion against the Russians that made us look like we were the provocateurs.

AMANDA SLOAT: It got to the point where we had to say to the Europeans,
“Fine, we can agree to disagree analytically, but let’s start planning as if we are
right. If we are right, then we’re in a good place because we’ve got all our
planning. If you’re right, that’s the best possible outcome because then there’s
not going to be an invasion — at best, this will have just been a waste of time.”

JON FINER : We eventually brought people around by bombarding them with

information that you could not ignore.

III: THE DOWNGRADE STRATEGY

‘WE WANTED TO MAKE SURE

THE WORLD WAS WIDE AWAKE’
N O V E M B E R – D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 1

JAKE SULLIVAN: In November, Jon Finer and I were having a conversation

about a scene in the movie Austin Powers. There’s a steamroller on the far side
of the room, and a guy standing there, holding up his hand, and shouting,
“No!” Then they zoom out, and the steamroller is moving incredibly slowly and
is really far away. The guy’s just standing there, frozen, shouting as it inches
across the room. I said I was determined that we were not going to be that guy
— just waiting for the steamroller to roll over Ukraine. We were going to act. In
 Crimea, they created a fait accompli before the world had really fully woken up
to what they had done. We wanted to make sure the world was wide awake.

EMILY HORNE: Taking a step back, the information environment had changed
dramatically since 2014. One, there’s a ton of commercially available satellite
imagery, open source, and anyone with access to those images could see for
themselves what Russia was doing on Ukraine’s borders. Second, there had
been just an explosion in citizen journalism in the use of social media to show
in real time what people were actually seeing, and this is coming from both
Russian and Ukrainian sources. It was out there on Twitter, it was out there on
TikTok. People could see for themselves, what these troops were doing — in
some cases where they were. Then third, you have a general public that has a
fundamentally different understanding of disinformation and misinformation
— those terms are in people’s vocabularies in a way that they weren’t in 2014.

A Russian army soldier takes part in drills in the Rostov region in southern Russia on Dec. 10, 2021. | AP Photo
JON FINER: There was a very high likelihood that Russia would use
disinformation — which is a fancy word for lies — to create some pretext for
invading. By putting out information well in advance of their inevitable
attempts to create this justification, we thought that we would be able to
discredit any attempt by Russia to portray this as a just war.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH : There have been times that false pretexts are
uttered by irresponsible actors, and if you’ve got the goods in terms of being
able to expose that, we’ve all learned that you have to expose that stuff.

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE: I’ve been involved since 2018 in being able to battle
Russian disinformation, whether or not it’s been in elections or other
scenarios. This truly is one where President Putin had no answers.

EMILY HORNE: Many of the senior policymakers who were in and still are in the
administration remember vividly seeing these intel streams in 2014 and then
seeing what had been predicted come to life. There was this feeling of: “We
knew this was coming, but we couldn’t say so because it was classified.” People
remember that frustration and felt that we couldn’t let that happen a second
time. All the conditions were there for us to try something new and bold, but
risky. It was a gamble that this would work.

JAKE SULLIVAN: We convened a meeting of our team to talk through a strategy

of downgrade [declassification], and then I engaged directly with the senior
most people in the intelligence community about how we could do this.

“The president made the decision to

declassify some of our intelligence
relatively early on.”
—BILL BURNS
BILL BURNS: The president made the decision to declassify some of our
intelligence relatively early on, which is always a complicated choice to make.
Along with my colleagues in the intelligence community, the DNI and others, I
believe strongly that it was the right choice. I had seen too many instances
where Putin had created false narratives that we never caught up to.

AVRIL HAINES: I remember quite clearly when [the president] directed me to do

this. I have this sense of “OK, we’ve got to figure out how to do this in a way
that protects sources and methods and understand what it is that we’re trying
to achieve here.” It became a real team sport. How do we do this in a way that
allows us to protect what we hold dearest?

JAKE SULLIVAN: What we would do is send to [the intelligence community] in

classified form the things that we wanted to be able to say, they would tell us
what could be declassified, and what couldn’t. We would take what they
declassified and put it out. That began in early December and became a central
feature of our approach through the beginning of the invasion — and since.

BILL BURNS: We shared intelligence quite systematically with the Ukrainians to

help them get ready to defend themselves.

AVRIL HAINES: In the discussions with the heads of intelligence organizations

for NATO, there was a fair amount of skepticism. People asking: “Really? Are
you in a way hyping up the threat as a consequence of what you’re suggesting?
Is this going to lead us into the situation as opposed to actually helping us to
prepare for it?”

EMILY HORNE: It was an extraordinarily unusual move to have the DNI go out
and brief the NAC [NATO’s North Atlantic Council] in person. She needed to
downgrade a fair amount of intelligence that, even though it was still in a
classified setting, could be shared with 30 NAC partners. We were able to share
a lot. It was a very persuasive presentation for a lot of them. Seeing that
impact, I think got us thinking about, “Well, what if this can be further
declassified so that it could be publicly shared? And how can we use our
knowledge of how the information environment has changed and apply lessons
 from 2014 and from this spring into trying to deny Russia the ability to seize
this narrative and use it to their benefit?”

AVRIL HAINES: You can’t share everything — you’re in a situation where part of
what you’re saying is “Trust me,” and so we had to be as careful and accurate as
possible. When there were things that didn’t make sense to us — of which there
were some — we started making sure we were presenting those, too. Here’s the
counterfactual. Here’s how we’re thinking about that. Here’s why we still
think this is adding up to something that’s of concern.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: We did several different members’ briefings up on the Hill
and then [DNI Haines] and some others also did the backgrounders with the
media, with appropriate authorization, to release the information of Russian
buildup and the potential for Russian invasion into the media space.

EMILY HORNE: The first time we put this into practice [with the press] was the
release of the map to the Washington Post and the article bundle that we
published on December 3.

Unclassified U.S. intelligence, initially obtained by The Washington Post, showed the buildup of Russian troops and the

potential for an invasion. | U.S. intelligence handout

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: It’s [usually] like pulling teeth to get information
declassified by the intelligence community. They curate their sources and
methods very carefully, and they are quite right to be concerned about
impairing their ability to collect information in the future by exposing
intelligence.

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE: People are always asking, “Hey, did you ever think
you’d be releasing your most sensitive intelligence to the American public?” I
thought to myself, “Little bit of change.” But what I really think: “This is the
nation’s intelligence. This isn’t an agency or the intelligence community’s or
anyone else’s intelligence. When it benefits our national security, why do we
not do that?”

JOHN KIRBY: I think this is one of the most valuable lessons that we have
learned from a communications perspective — the real benefit to downgrading
intelligence and making it public. You can really affect the decision-making
process of a potential adversary. We were beating Putin’s lie to the punch, and
we know that by doing so we got inside his decision-making loop.

“I remember … thinking to myself,

‘Either this is going to work as we
intended, or we may have just
started a war.’”
— E M I LY H O R N E

EMILY HORNE: I remember [the Washington Post article] came out at 7 p.m. on
a Friday, Washington time, which would have been 3 a.m. on a Saturday,
Moscow time, and I’ll confess I took a moment of pleasure in the fact that no
one in Moscow was going to be getting a good night’s sleep that night. I’m only
human. But I remember refreshing my browser over and over at my desk and
thinking to myself, “Either this is going to work as we intended, or we may have
just started a war.” It was one of the most intense moments of my career to
date.

JAKE SULLIVAN: It was a significant move we were making. It was putting the
credibility of the United States behind a claim that had substantial geopolitical
consequences.

BILL BURNS: I do think it made a difference, not only in putting Putin on his
back foot, but also in shoring up the solidarity and sense of purpose of NATO
allies as well.

IV: PR EPAR ING SANCTION S A N D A ID

 ‘START HIGH, STAY HIGH’
N O V E M B E R – D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 1

VICTORIA NULAND: The fact that we found the [Russian war] plans when we did
— and they were as robust as they were — and then they began to get played
out on the ground as Putin moved more and more of his arsenal to Ukraine’s
borders, gave us the time that we needed to prepare.

WALLY ADEYEMO , deputy secretary, Department of the Treasury: There was a

meeting in which it was made very clear by the president that we’re going to
think through how to use sanctions to both hold Russia accountable for the
action they’re taking, but also as something that we make clear to the Russians
we would do if they invaded, so they recognize we are ready to impose costs.

DALEEP SINGH: The best sanctions are the ones that never have to get used, so
by signaling as clearly as we could that these were going to be the most severe
sanctions ever on a large economy, perhaps we can deter Putin.

WALLY ADEYEMO: The president asked the Secretary of Treasury [Janet Yellen]
to start thinking about how to do that in a way that would accomplish two goals
— one was maximizing the impact on Russia and their ability to continue to
fight the war, but two, trying to limit the impact as much as possible on our
allies and partners.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Nov. 30, 2021. Yellen played a key role in

crafting the U.S. sanctions strategy toward Russia. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
DALEEP SINGH: I began to sketch out a package — start high, stay high. We
start at the very top of the escalation ladder and continue to mount escalating
pressure with the broadest coalition that we could mount.

WALLY ADEYEMO: We decided almost immediately to bring our allies and

partners in as quickly as possible, so fairly soon after we started to share intel
with the UK and Europe, we tried to have conversations about sanctions we
were considering.

EMILY HORNE: This effort certainly had Europeans at its center, but it really was
a global effort. Treasury officials were flying to the Gulf, flying to Asia, to have
these very intense conversations about the need to be prepared, making it clear
that an off-the-shelf [sanctions] package was not going to be sufficient, as
Russia thought we were going to do.

WALLY ADEYEMO: Throughout the process, there were concerns raised of “How
you do this could have this impact on my economy — is there a way for you to
design this slightly differently?”

DALEEP SINGH: I knew that we had to deliver an economic shock and awe. That
meant sanctioning the very largest Russian banks and the central bank. We
absolutely knew that another vulnerability of Russia was its lack of access to
cutting-edge technology — leading-edge semiconductors, quantum, biotech
and those technologies necessary for Putin to modernize his military and
sustain the invasion, but also to diversify the sources of economic growth. We
and the partners in the West control the commanding heights of cutting-edge
technology, so that was the second prong. The third prong was we’ve got to
downgrade his status as a leading energy supplier over time — this was a tricky
one because we wanted to minimize his energy export revenues while keeping
steady global supplies of oil.

“I knew that we had to deliver an

economic shock and awe. That
meant sanctioning the very largest
 Russian banks and the central
bank.”
—DALEEP SINGH

The fourth was — look in 2014, we didn’t win the narrative within Russia — so
this time, let’s seize the physical assets of the kleptocracy, the yachts, the fancy
cars and luxury apartments — not so much because we thought the owners of
those assets would influence Putin, but it was intended to be a demonstration
to the Russian people that they’d been getting ripped off for a very long time.

The last prong was: Let’s methodically eject Russia from the international
economic order. Russia had been enjoying the benefits and privileges of being a
full member of the World Bank and the IMF. Let’s remove those borrowing
privileges; let’s remove its status as an investment-grade borrower; let’s reduce
it to a small, isolated pariah economy.

The idea was that each of these five prongs would be mutually reinforcing, and
they would generate intensifying impact over time, in conjunction with
everything else that we were doing.

WALLY ADEYEMO: We realized the tool that we could use now in a different way
than we’d used in 2014 was export controls. The secretary made the point in a
Principals meeting that we need to bring in [the] Commerce [Department] as
soon as we could to make sure that we went after Russia’s supply chain.

VICTORIA NULAND: We decided back in December, that the G-7 would be the
core of the democratic response, and then we would build out from there.

LIZ TRUSS: The key area we thought we could make a difference was putting a
very serious package of sanctions together. That was the main topic of
conversation at the G-7 foreign ministers meeting we had in Liverpool [on Dec.
10-12].
 TOM SULLIVAN: The G-7 meeting in Liverpool with the foreign ministers was
the first time the G-7 had come together as the main coordinating mechanism
for sanctions.

A ForaBank branch in Moscow is seen on Dec. 7, 2021. There was a global effort to sanction the largest Russian banks

to deliver an economic shock and awe. | Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images

WALLY ADEYEMO: In our conversations with the U.K., they made clear that they
theoretically wanted to come alongside us, doing a bunch of these things, but
because they had just left the EU, they didn’t have any of the requisite
authorities to take these actions. A big piece of what we started to do was work
with the U.K. in designing what the authorities would look like for them to be
able to take sanctions actions against Russia. They worked quickly and were
able to get these in place relatively quickly.

VICTORIA NULAND: I spent a lot of time in December and January working on

sanctions coordination with the EU in particular, but also with the U.K.,
Canada and Japan. We were having G-7 political directors’ meetings by video,
it felt like every three days. The conversations about sanctions became more
detailed and more intense in December.
WALLY ADEYEMO: The diplomacy between the president and the secretary
getting people aligned on sanctions before Russia invaded was probably the
biggest difference between this time and Crimea in terms of our ability to act
quickly and effectively — things that we were unable to do back then.

VICTORIA NULAND: A lot of us were veterans of 2014, ’15 and ’16, and felt that if
we had done more faster then to help Ukraine, we might have had a better
result. Everything — from being able to release intelligence to having the
sharpest, strongest first move on sanctions, to getting security support into
Ukraine — we wanted to use those months, November, December, January, to
be as well prepared as possible.

“The diplomacy between the

President and the Secretary getting
people aligned on sanctions before
Russia invaded was probably the
biggest difference between this time
and Crimea.”
— W A L LY A D AY E M O

LIZ TRUSS : We were thinking, “What is the maximum we can do in the time
available? How can we send a very clear signal and warning that this would not
be some kind of walkover, and that the West would not just accept it?”

ANNE NEUBERGER : We were absolutely concerned because Russia has a history

with Ukraine — as well as with Georgia and Estonia — in terms of using cyber
in a destructive way as part of a geopolitical situation. We’re very concerned,
based on the history, that they would disrupt Ukrainian power, but also really
use cyber to destabilize and demoralize, to convey to the Ukrainian population,
“Your government is not functional.”

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE: We sent a [U.S. Cyber Command] team forward, and
they land in Kyiv on the fourth of December. Within a day or two, the leader
calls back, and she tells my Cyber National Mission Force commander, her
boss, “We’re not coming home for a while. In fact, send more people.” We sent
our largest “hunt forward” package into Kyiv. That stays there for a little over
70 days. What is a “hunt forward” operation? A hunt forward operation is
focused at the partner’s request to look at a series of networks — we identify
malware, tradecraft and anomalous behavior in those networks that point us to
adversaries and allow the partner — in this case, Ukraine — to strengthen those
networks.

The interesting thing that she — the team leader — said: “They’re really serious
about this.” This is the third time that we had been back in Ukraine, and there
was just a different feeling in terms of how Ukraine was approaching it. When
we provided information, they were moving on it, correcting the vulnerability,
and looking for more.

ANNE NEUBERGER : We brought the Ukrainian energy team here to work with
our national labs. We shared a whole list of targets that the Russians had
compromised to enable the Ukrainians to rapidly address them; we put a real
focus on their energy systems, and the Cyber Command team focused on
military and transportation networks.

COLIN KAHL : Secretary Austin was very deliberate about setting all the
conditions to enable a rapid deployment, but not actually to recommend
moving a bunch of troops forward until we had unambiguous warning that this
was going to happen, so that we didn’t get into this trap where we actually set
in motion a chain of events we were trying to prevent.

JAMES HOPE , mission director for Ukraine and Belarus, USAID, U.S.
Embassy, Kyiv: As it became clear there was a lead-up to something, our job —
what we focused on — was really working with our interagency partners here in
the Embassy Kyiv to begin contingency planning.

Our focus, very much from the beginning, was how to prepare for a
humanitarian crisis. How do you line up the right humanitarian and other
folks who can be part of that response? How do you line up differing supplies,
commodities, things like that to get ready for a potential need? Just as a good
example: Since it was almost wintertime, we figured a primary need will be
winter-related items, so we focused on pre-positioning as much as possible — a
lot of folks displaced, moved out of their homes, they may require basic things
like blankets.

USAID has what we call a Disaster Assistance Response Team — DART. You
see them around the world when there’s an earthquake, a natural disaster, a
conflict or crisis. Planning to line up those experts, specialists, humanitarian
response began early on in December. We had people come out to Kyiv to do
some planning. The same with commodities — Dubai is a big commodity hub
for USAID, for a variety of responses in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, and at
the time, that was a good source for us to get things into Ukraine.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: There are indicators that you can tell as a professional
soldier that separate the real thing from exercises, certain things you’re doing
in exercises that you don’t do for invasions, and certain things you do in an
invasion that you don’t do for exercises — a lot of it’s logistics, hospitals, tents,
evacuation, blood, mobilization of doctors and nurses and medical people. The
significant amounts of ammunition and getting them stored. Then the scale,
the size. If you do an exercise and you have 200,000 troops, that’s very
expensive. That’s a lot of money. They put it together in September, October,
and then all sudden, you’ve still got those guys in the field in November? In
December, it’s like, What are you doing? No one exercises that long. What
kind of exercise is that?

VICTORIA NULAND : Once I saw 100 BTGs [Battalion Tactical Groups] worth of
tanks and equipment and people surrounding two sides of Ukraine, which we
saw by the new year, I broadly expected that Putin would move. That is a
massive expense, a massive commitment, a massive investment — and an
arrogant investment, as it turns out, in his own military’s ability to make a
quick, sharp strike.

LAURA COOPER: It was the buildup of the intelligence and the picture of forces
that gradually became more and more and more convincing that this really was
what Russia would do. In the December time frame, all of the pieces were being
put in place.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH : There were very trained eyes who had seen
exercises, and they had not seen this.

VICTORIA NULAND: Suffice to say that in December I brought all of my shower

stuff, a couple of changes of clothes, things to sleep in, a blanket and a much
more nutritious array of snacks into the office, because I knew it was
unpredictable what our hours would look like.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF , chair, House Intelligence Committee: This was the run-up
to war.

V: ATTEMPTS TO KEEP TH E P EAC E

‘MAYBE THERE WAS A WAY OF

AVERTING A WAR’
JA N U A R Y 2 0 2 2

AMB. MICHAEL CARPENTER : We thought, “OK, if there’s a crisis of European

security, then let’s talk about it. Let’s identify the Russian concerns and see if
there’s a way that we can address them through diplomacy.” Poland assumed
the chairperson-ship of the OSCE on January 1, 2022, and so I immediately
went to go visit with the Polish Foreign Minister to talk about the diplomatic
angle. He was very receptive, and subsequently launched a process called the
renewed European Security Dialogue. Russia basically refused to engage, and
that’s when it became increasingly clear the Kremlin really had no interest in
diplomacy all along. It was bent on war.
 All of its alleged concerns — everything that it was putting out there in the
public domain — was really a smokescreen. They turned their backs completely
on the diplomacy that we were proposing at the OSCE, the diplomacy that was
being proposed on behalf of NATO and then also bilaterally what we were
discussing with the Russians. There was nothing to offer them, because they
didn’t even want to talk.

VICTORIA NULAND : There was a lot of coordination to explain to first our G-7
colleagues, then globally to countries, that we were trying to address the stated
worries and requirements of the Russian Federation to preempt a military
move.

A satellite image shows Russian tanks and artillery tents congregated in Voronezh, Russia on Jan. 16, 2022. | Maxar

Technologies

DAME KAREN PIERCE : That may in a funny way be a good side effect of the
pandemic — officials had got so used to working with people abroad by Zoom,
it was much more natural to do that sort of coordination than it would have
been if we’d not all had two years of it during the pandemic. Normally these
things aren’t smooth at all. People just got into good habits of cooperation-by-
Zoom.
ANTONY BLINKEN : It was important that we do everything we could to test this
question, because maybe there was a way of averting a war.

LAURA COOPER : From January onward, it was incredibly intense.

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE : In January, the National Security Agency is releasing

cybersecurity advisories at an unclassified level to alert what we are seeing
from our partners in Ukraine, and also provide further information to what we
might anticipate in the United States. This is one of the things that I’m thinking
about all the time is, you know, “What are our vulnerabilities?” Working across
the FBI, CISA and the Department of Homeland Security — what are we
seeing that might inform us of what an adversary, in this case the Russians,
might do to us? This was really active. These were conversations going on every
day.

ANNE NEUBERGER : Key agencies — the Department of Energy, Treasury, EPA

— all brought in their key [private sector] executives, and we provided
classified briefings to them on the threats that we saw and continuously kept
them updated and pressed for them to do things in an unusual way. For
example, NERC, which is a regulatory arm of the Department of Energy, issued
a notice for specific practices and required companies to respond on what they
had done.

BILL BURNS : I saw Zelenskyy in the middle of January to lay out the most
recent intelligence we had about Russian planning for the invasion, which by
that point had sharpened its focus to come straight across the Belarus frontier
— just a relatively short drive from Kyiv — to take Kyiv, decapitate the regime
and establish a pro-Russian government there. With some fair amount of
detail, including, for example, the Russian intent to seize an airport northwest
of Kyiv called Hostomel, and use that as a platform to bring in airborne forces
as well to accelerate the seizure of Kyiv.

JOHN KIRBY: There was a mutual understanding that things were not looking
good.
 “President Zelenskyy in that
January conversation was very
focused. He was in a bind. He did not
want to spark an economic or
political panic.”
—BILL BURNS

BILL BURNS : President Zelenskyy in that January conversation was very

focused. He was in a bind. I was very impressed with him then, but I could
understand the predicament he was in, too. He did not want to spark an
economic or political panic in Ukraine. He was cautious about taking steps like
a full mobilization of the Ukrainian military that Putin could then seize upon as
evidence of provocation. But he was clearly sobered. They have really good
intelligence services. His own services were picking this up by then. He took it
quite seriously.

ANTONY BLINKEN : I saw Foreign Minister Lavrov in Geneva in late January,

the 21st, because we were determined to exhaust every diplomatic avenue. It
was incredibly blustery in Geneva — I’ve never seen Lake Geneva more agitated
in my life, like an ocean with a major storm setting in. I alluded to that and
said, “You know, we have a responsibility to see if we can calm the seas — calm
the lake.” Lavrov was uncharacteristically focused on his talking points, and
there wasn’t much extemporaneous give and take, which is not usually the case
with him.

I wanted to see if there was some final way of breaking through and suggested
we spend some time alone after the meeting with our teams. We sat in chairs
about a foot from each other. I asked him, “Tell me, what are you trying to do?
What is actually going on here? Is this really about your purported security
concerns? Or is this about something theological, which is Putin’s conviction
that Ukraine is not an independent state and has to be subsumed into Russia?
If it’s the former, if this is genuinely from your perspective about security
 concerns that Russia has, well we owe it to try to talk about those and our own
profound security concerns about what Russia is doing, because we need to
avert a war. But if it’s about the latter, if this is about this profoundly misplaced
view that Ukraine is not its own country, and you’re determined to subsume it
into Russia, well, there’s nothing to talk about.” He couldn’t or wouldn’t give
me a straight answer.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) greets Lavrov before their meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on Jan. 21, 2022. |

Pool photo by Alex Brandon

BILL BURNS: The president himself understood right from the beginning what
was at stake. He was deeply familiar with a lot of the players. He had dealt with
Putin before. He had dealt with the Ukrainians. He knew our NATO allies very
well. He understood the challenge.

ANTONY BLINKEN: As [President Biden] said multiple times, this is bigger than
even Ukraine itself and the Ukrainian people. It goes to the very principles that
are at the heart of trying to keep peace and security around the world — the
notion that one country can’t simply invade another, that one big country can’t
bully its neighbor, that one country can’t try to erase another off the map.
Those principles have been so important since World War II to try to prevent
another major conflagration. If we allow them to be violated with impunity,
then we open a Pandora’s Box to would-be aggressors around the world.

GEN. MARK MILLEY: Right off the bat, the president issued a set of guidance,
publicly in speeches. He said the purpose of this operation, of what we’re doing
— the why — is the rules-based international order. And the end state is a free
independent sovereign Ukrainian territory. He’s been clear about that from day
one, and he hasn’t moved off it.

VICE ADM. FRANK WHITWORTH: When you’re thinking about things that
threaten rules-based order, it gets your attention very quickly. It put an
element of gravitas into our reporting.

BILL BURNS : Assuming we were right about the magnitude of this invasion, it
would be the biggest ground war in Europe since the Second World War.

MATTHEW MILLER , special advisor, National Security Council, White House: I

was recruited in late January to help manage the government’s focus on
Ukraine. I remember the first phone call I got, Yohannes Abraham — the NSC
chief of staff — said, “Look, I can’t tell you anything and I can’t reveal the U.S.
intelligence, but everything you read in the press we believe is going to happen
any day.” My job was to coordinate the communications and legislative branch
relations across the government on this one issue — recognizing that the
government’s a big place, a lot of people, and one of the hardest challenges on a
big, fast-moving crisis like this is one hand knowing what the other’s doing. It
was a recognition that things are about to go on to a whole different level.

BILL BURNS : I spent a lot of time throughout this period talking to members of
Congress, our oversight committees in the Senate and the House, to make sure
that they were up to date and saw what we saw.

MATTHEW MILLER : There was a constant push from the Hill to do more, do
something different, or do it earlier. There was talk of legislation to sanction
Russia in various ways before the invasion, but our belief was always if there
was a chance that the hammer of sanctions could at all dissuade Putin from
invading — and that was by no means a sure thing — we shouldn’t deploy that
hammer too soon.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM : There’s no question in my mind where we had a

window of opportunity to change the calculation of the Russians and we didn’t
take it — that would have been severe pre-invasion sanctions and flowing
weapons into the Ukraine to defend themselves. I thought the buildup of force,
threatening to dismember a democracy, was enough reason to sanction Russia.

MATTHEW MILLER : I don’t recall anyone that believed there was any strategic
value in sanctioning Putin beforehand. It gets you nothing to do it three weeks
in advance. There was never any real debate over doing that.

“I remember talking to the

administration—Blinken, Sullivan—
and the administration was of the
line: We don’t want to be too
provocative.”
—LINDSEY GRAHAM

LIZ TRUSS : The logic of threatening the sanctions and putting them on when
the invasion took place was that it was a deterrent. And if you’ve already put
the sanctions on, what’s the deterrent? I think when you look back, it was the
failure to act significantly in 2014 — or before that — that was the problem.
Probably by the autumn of 2021 it may well have been too late.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: There was a lot of bipartisan support to put in place
pre-invasion sanctions to deter and to start flowing weapons in: more Javelins,
more defensive weapons. I remember talking to the administration — Blinken,
Sullivan — and the administration was of the line: We don’t want to be too
provocative. At every turn the administration pushed back on efforts to
increase the cost of the invasion before it happened.
 EMILY HORNE : There were things that we were seeing in the intelligence that
were different from April that were very concerning. One early one we started
talking about publicly in mid-January was the Russians building field
hospitals; they were bringing blood supplies down to the border. Those are not
actions that you take if you are running a drill or an exercise. You saw forces
going up to the border, building temporary infrastructure — like barracks and
rudimentary roads — and then retreating back. These were preparatory
movements that signaled this is not a drill.

Russian tanks take part in drills in the Rostov region in southern Russia on Jan. 12, 2022. | AP Photo

LAURA COOPER : On January 24, 8,500 U.S. military personnel were placed on
heightened alert status, and then, starting February 2, we were deploying
forces to Germany, into Poland. We actually repositioned a Stryker squadron
from Germany to Romania on February 2, and then on February 12, we sent an
additional 3,000 U.S. personnel to Poland. As we were deploying these forces,
and in the lead up to these deployments, we were engaged in very intensive
diplomacy with our allies — we were talking with our eastern flank allies to
ensure that they understood that we regarded the Article Five commitment to
their security as sacrosanct.
VICTORIA NULAND : Frankly, we didn’t have a good sense of exactly when they
would move. We thought it could be anywhere from the last week of January to
the last week of February.

VI: OVER DR IVE

‘IT’S COMING SOON’

E A R LY- M I D F E B R U A R Y
LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD , U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, New
York: By the first of February it was pretty clear what was going on.

BILL BURNS : It was always difficult to have a sense of exactly when the hour
would come, when the invasion would start. Putin and his high command —
and it was still a very tight decision-making circle then — we could see they
were also trying to figure out exactly whether they thought they were ready and
when to launch this as well, too.

GEN. PAUL NAKASONE: Fourth of February, I’m watching the Olympics,

watching President Putin and President Xi meeting in Beijing. I’m thinking to
myself, “Hey, I wonder if President Putin is going to let him in on the secret
that he’s going to invade Ukraine?” Of course, we know later that the Chinese
claim that there was nothing talked about that there — my thought is, “I
wonder how good a friendship that truly is?”

AMB. JOHN SULLIVAN: The week of Monday, February 7th, from early in the
morning until late at night, we had a series of Deputies Committee meetings,
Principals Committee meetings. There was a more specialized focus on, at the
deputies level, on our embassies in Kyiv and Moscow — their security,
operations and so forth. You have to overlay the pending war — the war drums
— with the fact that we were a diminished mission to Russia already,
understaffed because of the so-called visa war that had been going on for years.
The threat of this war increased the threat and the stress. We didn’t know what
would happen if the Russians invaded, were there going to be mass protests
outside the embassy? At one point, it must have been in 2021, somebody threw
a large bag of blood over the wall of the embassy. It turned out to be animal
blood, but we didn’t know what was going to happen to us and what might
come over the wall — in human form or in animal form.

LIZ TRUSS : I went to Moscow on February 10th. This is something we’d

discussed with our allies — that we would all try and visit Moscow and do
whatever we could to try and get the message across that there was going to be
no accommodation of any kind of invasion of Ukraine — that Russia would be
seen as a pariah, they would be isolated, they’d be isolated diplomatically,
they’d be hit with sanctions. My visit was part of that overall aim to get the
message across, which wasn’t being heard.

There’s still question marks about to what extent Lavrov is in the inner circle or
not in Russia, but at that point, we all felt it was worth doing all we possibly
could because the price was so high of not doing that. I’d met Lavrov before,
twice, I knew the types of propaganda that came out of any meeting with him.

This was my first visit to Moscow, and what really struck me was just how,
compared to Kyiv which I visited shortly afterwards, Moscow was just very
much business as usual in the city. You wouldn’t have known anything was
going on. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, likewise. Lavrov completely denied
there were any plans to do anything. It was the usual stuff about “Russia’s
security was being threatened,” which I’d heard many times before. The sheer
normality was odd, given the circumstances. It was surreal.
Then-British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss met with Lavrov in Moscow on Feb. 10, 2022 (top), in an attempt to defuse

tensions raised by Russia's military buildup near Ukraine. But as the snow fell in the city that day (bottom), there were

no signs of increased military activity or invasion preparations. | Russian Foreign Ministry Press Service via AP and Bai

Xueqi/Xinhua via Getty Images

DEREK CHOLLET , counselor, Department of State: Some new intelligence had

come in that had gotten the White House and Washington all churning in the
late afternoon on the 10th — a Thursday — about indications of Russian attack
that could be in a few days, February 16-17 was the initial indication. We had
had ample strategic warning up to this point, but this was now we were getting
into tactical warning of when this could start. Things really pushed into
overdrive.

EMILY HORNE : We had two meetings that evening [on February 10] in the
Situation Room. The entire picture that was painted there was quite dire and
specific in a way that had not been to that point.

MATTHEW MILLER : The world believed this invasion would not happen until the
end of the Olympics on February 20th, and we had information that led us to
believe that was not accurate. We did a number of things, including Jake going
to the podium on February 11 and making very clear that people should not
assume the invasion could not come before the end of the Olympics.

EMILY HORNE : It was my 40th birthday. I called my husband and told him,
‘Please put the steaks back in the fridge.’

JAKE SULLIVAN: Our whole strategy in terms of our public approach was to
make sure [the Russians] did not get the jump on us. We talked to the
president and his national security cabinet agreed that I should go out and
basically say, “Hey, we now think this is happening and we think this is
happening very soon.” What we definitely didn’t want to have happen was to
spend two months preparing the ground for what was likely to unfold and then
get surprised when the tanks started to roll.

EMILY HORNE : We decided Jake was going to go out to the podium with [White
House spokesperson] Jen [Psaki] the next day and do a couple of things: One,
 was going to make very, very clear that any American or dual nationals in
Ukraine needed to get out immediately and that the cavalry would not come to
rescue Americans after an invasion has begun. That was certainly a lesson
learned from Afghanistan: You can’t over-message that, and you have to be
extremely clear, even at the risk of causing a little bit of panic. The Ukrainians
were not terribly happy about that message, but we absolutely did not have a
choice, given what we were seeing. The new phrase that Jake deployed on that
February 11 press conference was “We are in a window where an invasion could
begin at any time.”

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.’”
—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’
M I D - F E B R U A R Y

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

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.”
—JA K E S U L L I VA N

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.
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 PR EC IPIC E

‘THE LAST OPPORTUNITY’

 D AYS B E F O R E T H E I N VA S I O N

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.
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’
F E B R U A R Y 2 2 N D – 2 5 T H
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?”

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’

H O U R S A F T E R T H E I N VA S I O N

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.
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
70,000 U.S. forces in total in Europe — all types, Army, Navy, Air Force,
Marines. By the invasion, I think we had 110,000, 112,000.

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.

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.”
—A M B . J O H N S U L L I VA N

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’
D AYS A F T E R T H E I N VA S I O N

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 WALL ANDER

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.”

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.
 C ONC LUSION: C OLLECT IV E R ES OLV E

‘A LONG, GRINDING FIGHT’

M A R C H 2 0 2 2 T O T O D AY

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 H I S T O R Y, UKRAINE, R U S S I A’ S WAR ON UKRAINE, POLITICO WEEKEND,

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