Why the world was wrong about Putin | Analysis

People are packing up in their cars. They're getting out of here. A few days before I found myself standing there on the edge of Kharkiv, watching those first tank shells hit into the apartment blocks in Saltyvka, my editor, Louis Emmanuel, had asked me to come up with something to be published on the day of the war, if the war began, explaining to readers why this was happening. And I was hoping it would never be published. It was, and the answer I came up with was, probably in the simple balance of power. I quote it, Russia's military is at its strongest and most capable since the Cold War. Its public finances are also in good order, and Mr Putin may believe he is well placed to bear the costs of the conflict and inevitable sanctions.

We'll come back to that in a second. The West is conversely at a moment of historic economic, military and political weakness. The Americans are preoccupied, Britain is preoccupied, post-Brexit mess, we all remember what it was like. Meanwhile, Ukraine has slowly been growing stronger. It has rebuilt its army since the humiliation of Russia's annexation of Crimea and war in Donbas in 2014. The eight-year low-level conflict since failed to compel Kiev to accept peace on Russia's terms, but provided its troops with valuable combat experience against Russian-led forces. Now, I think that is still a reasonable description of not only how Vladimir Putin looked at the situation, but how many of us, including journalists, including Western leaders, looked at the world.

Let's take the first point, Russia in a position of strength. It was universally accepted that the Russian military had been modernized, that it had picked up experience in Ukraine in the previous low-level war. In 2014, in Syria, mercenary groups like Varganoff and Libya, they were thought to be combat-effective. They were thought to have learnt lessons in the past. They had been through a massive rearmament program. They were generally considered the second most powerful and effective military on the planet after the US Army. Well, hasn't that come crashing down to earth? Those first few hours of the invasion, I must say, were absolutely terrifying.

We woke up to missiles landing all over the place, and then suddenly the missiles stopped. And then there was an air base down the road that they hadn't destroyed, and then they left it. And then the column coming towards Kiev, ground to a halt, and it quickly became apparent that, to some degree, this Russian military was a paper tiger. We don't want to play it down, they're still in the fight. Vladimir Putin thought that his military was good enough to take out an entire country in about three days. 365 days later, we see how that's going. But the other part of that is a bit more interesting and a little bit more tricky for the West today.

When he said he thought he was well placed to bear the costs of the conflict and inevitable sanctions. The Russian economy has actually held up much, much better than many people expected. Sanctions are hurting Russia. There's no way you can pretend that the war hasn't affected that country, hasn't caused great problems. But actually, the Kremlin's financial and economic team have done a pretty good job of keeping the place afloat. There has not been rampant inflation. There has not been an economic collapse that some people were predicting that could possibly lead to public pressure for the war to end.

And then the next point, the West, conversely at a moment of historic economic military and political weakness. I think there were reasonable grounds for that assessment. And it was striking in the run-up to the war how Western leaders like Joe Biden, like Boris Johnson, kept on saying we're going to have this amazing sanctions package. If the Russians do it, they're going to regret it, but they could never say what it was. I put this to a senior Ukrainian diplomat who said, well, look, nothing's decided till everything's decided. And the reason you're not getting specifics is because other Western countries just are not on board. They cannot.

Right to the last minute, they were struggling to get consensus on how to respond to this. That has changed. This challenge has clearly breathed new unity, new purpose into NATO, into the Western Alliance. And if one of, pardon me, a big massive miscalculations, and perhaps to be honest, one of my miscalculations was to believe that the West might crumble, might roll over, that it would be like Crimea again in 2014, that there would be some sanctions and then, you know, let's get back to business as usual, that kind of thing. And then the last point, Ukraine's own strength. This is perhaps the most important point I wrote one year ago that Ukraine had been growing strong. And was only going to get stronger.

And that's why Vladimir Putin thought he had to go to war now. Well, that turned out to be remarkably true. The sheer professionalism, the fighting spirit, the effectiveness of the Ukrainian armed forces didn't just take the Russians by surprise. It also took, I think, their closest allies by surprise. I think, to be honest, they might not want to admit it. I think a lot of even American and British officials and generals were expecting Ukraine to lose this war quite quickly. It also took a lot of Ukrainians by surprise.

I mean, I've, you know, had friends saying, yeah, I didn't think we'd be standing here months later. I know a guy who signed up to the army on that second morning, the second day of the invasion, went to the recruiting office and he told me, we were all, we kind of knew we were going to die. You know, we were up against the second army in the world. We thought they were a superpower. After a year, I think this analysis still holds. I think this was a pretty good account of why Vladimir Putin decided to launch the war now. But after a year, it's fascinating, isn't it, that all those assumptions that we had, that Ukrainians had about their own country, and most of all that the Kremlin had about the West and its own strength and Ukraine have really faced the most profound reality check.

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