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RUSSIA’S GAMBLE:
Read the full series

Russia’s spies misread Ukraine and misled Kremlin as war loomed
Battle for Kyiv: Ukrainian valor, Russian blunders combined to save the capital
An interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
The Post examined the lead-up to the Ukraine war. Here’s what we learned.
5 things you need to know about Russia’s intelligence failures ahead of the
invasion of Ukraine
5 ways Ukraine fought and saved its capital from Russian invaders
End of carousel
The Washington Post
Exclusive


ROAD TO WAR: U.S. STRUGGLED TO CONVINCE ALLIES, AND ZELENSKY, OF RISK OF
INVASION


President Biden, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. (Emily Sabens/The
Washington Post; Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP/Getty; Demetrius Freeman/The
Washington Post; Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty; iStock)
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By Shane Harris
, 
Karen DeYoung
, 
Isabelle Khurshudyan
, 
Ashley Parker
and 
Liz Sly
 
Aug. 16 at 7:39 a.m.
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On a sunny October morning, the nation’s top intelligence, military and
diplomatic leaders filed into the Oval Office for an urgent meeting with
President Biden. They arrived bearing a highly classified intelligence analysis,
compiled from newly obtained satellite images, intercepted communications and
human sources, that amounted to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war plans for
a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

For months, Biden administration officials had watched warily as Putin massed
tens of thousands of troops and lined up tanks and missiles along Ukraine’s
borders. As summer waned, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, had
focused on the increasing volume of intelligence related to Russia and Ukraine.
He had set up the Oval Office meeting after his own thinking had gone from
uncertainty about Russia’s intentions, to concern he was being too skeptical
about the prospects of military action, to alarm.


ROAD TO WAR: Read key takeawaysChevronRight

The session was one of several meetings that officials had about Ukraine that
autumn — sometimes gathering in smaller groups — but was notable for the
detailed intelligence picture that was presented. Biden and Vice President
Harris took their places in armchairs before the fireplace, while Secretary of
State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the directors of national
intelligence and the CIA on sofas around the coffee table.

Tasked by Sullivan with putting together a comprehensive overview of Russia’s
intentions, they told Biden that the intelligence on Putin’s operational plans,
added to ongoing deployments along the border with Ukraine, showed that all the
pieces were now in place for a massive assault.

The U.S. intelligence community had penetrated multiple points of Russia’s
political leadership, spying apparatus and military, from senior levels to the
front lines, according to U.S. officials.

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Much more radical than Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and instigation of a
separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, Putin’s war plans envisioned a takeover
of most of the country.

Using mounted maps on easels in front of the Resolute Desk, Milley showed
Russian troop positions and the Ukrainian terrain they intended to conquer. It
was a plan of staggering audacity, one that could pose a direct threat to NATO’s
eastern flank, or even destroy the post-World War II security architecture of
Europe.

As he absorbed the briefing, Biden, who had taken office promising to keep the
country out of new wars, was determined that Putin must either be deterred or
confronted, and that the United States must not act alone. Yet NATO was far from
unified on how to deal with Moscow, and U.S. credibility was weak. After a
disastrous occupation of Iraq, the chaos that followed the U.S. withdrawal from
Afghanistan, and four years of President Donald Trump seeking to undermine the
alliance, it was far from certain that Biden could effectively lead a Western
response to an expansionist Russia.


Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Emily Sabens/The
Washington Post; Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post; iStock)

Ukraine was a troubled former Soviet republic with a history of corruption, and
the U.S. and allied answer to earlier Russian aggression there had been
uncertain and divided. When the invasion came, the Ukrainians would need
significant new weaponry to defend themselves. Too little could guarantee a
Russian victory. But too much might provoke a direct NATO conflict with
nuclear-armed Russia.

This account, in previously unreported detail, shines new light on the uphill
climb to restore U.S. credibility, the attempt to balance secrecy around
intelligence with the need to persuade others of its truth, and the challenge of
determining how the world’s most powerful military alliance would help a
less-than-perfect democracy on Russia’s border defy an attack without NATO
firing a shot.

The first in a series of articles examining the road to war and the military
campaign in Ukraine, it is drawn from in-depth interviews with more than three
dozen senior U.S., Ukrainian, European and NATO officials about a global crisis
whose end is yet to be determined. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss sensitive intelligence and internal deliberations.

The Kremlin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

As Milley laid out the array of forces on that October morning, he and the
others summed up Putin’s intentions. “We assess that they plan to conduct a
significant strategic attack on Ukraine from multiple directions
simultaneously,” Milley told the president. “Their version of ‘shock and awe.’ ”

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According to the intelligence, the Russians would come from the north, on either
side of Kyiv. One force would move east of the capital through the Ukrainian
city of Chernihiv, while the other would flank Kyiv on the west, pushing
southward from Belarus through a natural gap between the “exclusion zone” at the
abandoned Chernobyl nuclear plant and surrounding marshland. The attack would
happen in the winter so that the hard earth would make the terrain easily
passable for tanks. Forming a pincer around the capital, Russian troops planned
to seize Kyiv in three to four days. The Spetsnaz, their special forces, would
find and remove President Volodymyr Zelensky, killing him if necessary, and
install a Kremlin-friendly puppet government.

Separately, Russian forces would come from the east and drive through central
Ukraine to the Dnieper River, while troops from Crimea took over the
southeastern coast. Those actions could take several weeks, the Russian plans
predicted.

[Maps of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine]

After pausing to regroup and rearm, they would next push westward, toward a
north-south line stretching from Moldova to western Belarus, leaving a rump
Ukrainian state in the west — an area that in Putin’s calculus was populated by
irredeemable neo-Nazi Russophobes.

The United States had obtained “extraordinary detail” about the Kremlin’s secret
plans for a war it continued to deny it intended, Director of National
Intelligence Avril Haines later explained. They included not only the
positioning of troops and weaponry and operational strategy, but also fine
points such as Putin’s “unusual and sharp increases in funding for military
contingency operations and for building up reserve forces even as other pressing
needs, such as pandemic response, were under-resourced,” she said. This was no
mere exercise in intimidation, unlike a large-scale Russian deployment in April,
when Putin’s forces had menaced Ukraine’s borders but never attacked.

Some in the White House found it hard to wrap their minds around the scale of
the Russian leader’s ambitions.

“It did not seem like the kind of thing that a rational country would
undertake,” one participant in the meeting later said of the planned occupation
of most of a country of 232,000 square miles and nearly 45 million people. Parts
of Ukraine were deeply anti-Russian, raising the specter of an insurgency even
if Putin toppled the government in Kyiv. And yet the intelligence showed that
more and more troops were arriving and settling in for a full campaign.
Munitions, food and crucial supplies were being deposited at Russian
encampments.

Biden pressed his advisers. Did they really think that this time Putin was
likely to strike?

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Yes, they affirmed. This is real. Although the administration would publicly
insist over the next several months that it did not believe Putin had made a
final decision, the only thing his team couldn’t tell the president that autumn
day was exactly when the Russian president would pull the trigger.

CIA Director William J. Burns, who had served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow and
had had the most direct interactions with Putin of anyone in the Biden
administration, described the Russian leader to the others as fixated on
Ukraine. Control over the country was synonymous with Putin’s concept of Russian
identity and authority. The precision of the war planning, coupled with Putin’s
conviction that Ukraine should be reabsorbed by the motherland, left him with no
doubts that Putin was prepared to invade.

“I believed he was quite serious,” Burns said months later, recalling the
briefing.


II




The intelligence had underscored the promise of Putin’s own words. Three months
earlier, in July, he had published a 7,000-word essay, “On the Historical Unity
Between Russians and Ukrainians,” suffused with grievance and dubious
assertions. Russians and Ukrainians, he argued, were “one people” — an idea
rooted in Putin’s claims about “blood ties” — and Moscow had been “robbed” of
its own territory by a scheming West.

“I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership
with Russia,” Putin wrote.

Just weeks before the essay appeared, Biden and Putin had held a June 16 summit
that both declared was “constructive.” At that point, Ukraine was a concern, but
one that White House officials felt could be dealt with. As the White House
delegation left the meeting, held in Geneva, a senior Biden aide would later
recall, “we didn’t get on the plane and come home and think the world was on the
cusp of a major war in Europe.”

But Putin’s subsequent publication “caught our attention in a big way,” Sullivan
later said. “We began to look at what’s going on here, what’s his end game? How
hard is he going to push?” As a precaution, on Aug. 27, Biden authorized that
$60 million in largely defensive weapons be drawn from U.S. inventories and sent
to Ukraine.

By late summer, as they pieced together the intelligence from the border and
from Moscow, analysts who had spent their careers studying Putin were
increasingly convinced the Russian leader — himself a former intelligence
officer — saw a window of opportunity closing. Ukrainians had already twice
risen up to demand a democratic future, free from corruption and Moscow’s
interference, during the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution, and the 2013-2014 Maidan
protests that preceded Russia’s annexation of Crimea.


Putin and Biden in Geneva in June 2021. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post;
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty; iStock)

While not a member of NATO or the European Union, Ukraine was now moving
steadily into the Western political, economic and cultural orbit. That drift fed
Putin’s broader resentment about Russia’s loss of empire.

In a grim actuarial assessment, the analysts concluded that Putin, who was about
to turn 69, understood that he was running out of time to cement his legacy as
one of Russia’s great leaders — the one who had restored Russian preeminence on
the Eurasian continent.

The analysts said Putin calculated that any Western response to an attempt to
reclaim Ukraine by force would be big on outrage but limited in actual
punishment. The Russian leader, they said, believed that the Biden
administration was chastened by the humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan
and wanted to avoid new wars. The United States and Europe were still struggling
through the coronavirus pandemic. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the de facto
European leader, was leaving office and handing power to an untested successor.
French President Emmanuel Macron was facing a reelection battle against a
resurgent right wing, and Britain was suffering from a post-Brexit economic
downturn. Large parts of the continent depended on Russian oil and natural gas,
which Putin thought he could use as a wedge to split the Western alliance. He
had built up hundreds of billions of dollars in cash reserves and was confident
the Russian economy could weather the inevitable sanctions, as it had in the
past.

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Presented with the new intelligence and analysis at the October briefing, Biden
“basically had two reactions,” Sullivan said. First, to try to deter Putin, they
“needed to send somebody to Moscow to sit with the Russians at a senior level
and tell them: ‘If you do this, these will be the consequences.’ ”

Second, they needed to brief allies on the U.S. intelligence and bring them on
board with what the administration believed should be a unified and severe
posture of threatened sanctions against Russia, reinforcement and expansion of
NATO defenses, and assistance for Ukraine.

Burns was dispatched to Moscow and Haines to NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Months later, Milley still carried in his briefcase note cards encapsulating the
U.S. interests and strategic objectives discussed at the October briefing. He
could recite them off the top of his head.

Problem: “How do you underwrite and enforce the rules-based international order”
against a country with extraordinary nuclear capability, “without going to World
War III?”

No. 1: “Don’t have a kinetic conflict between the U.S. military and NATO with
Russia.” No. 2: “Contain war inside the geographical boundaries of Ukraine.” No.
3: “Strengthen and maintain NATO unity.” No. 4: “Empower Ukraine and give them
the means to fight.”

Biden’s advisers were confident Ukraine would put up a fight. The United States,
Britain and other NATO members had spent years training and equipping the
Ukrainian military, which was more professional and better organized than before
Russia’s assault on Crimea and the eastern region of Donbas seven years earlier.
But the training had focused nearly as much on how to mount internal resistance
after a Russian occupation as on how to prevent it in the first place. The
weapons they had supplied were primarily small-bore and defensive so that they
wouldn’t be seen as a Western provocation.

[Breaking down the billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Ukraine]

The administration also had grave concerns about Ukraine’s young president, a
former television comic who had come into office on a huge wave of popular
support and desire for fundamental change but had lost public standing in part
because he failed to make good on a promise to make peace with Russia. Zelensky,
44, appeared to be no match for the ruthless Putin.

Math was not in Ukraine’s favor. Russia had more troops, more tanks, more
artillery, more fighter jets and guided missiles, and had demonstrated in
previous conflicts its willingness to pummel its weaker adversaries into
submission, with no regard for the loss of civilian lives.

Kyiv might not fall as quickly as the Russians expected, the Americans
concluded, but it would fall.


III




On Nov. 2, Burns was escorted into the Kremlin office of Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s
foreign policy adviser and a former ambassador to the United States. Ushakov’s
boss was on the other end of a phone line and spoke to Burns from the resort
city of Sochi, where he had retreated during another wave of coronavirus
infections in Moscow.

The Russian leader recited his usual complaints about NATO expansion, the threat
to Russian security, and illegitimate leadership in Ukraine.

“He was very dismissive of President Zelensky as a political leader,” Burns
recalled.

Practiced at listening to Putin’s tirades from his years in Moscow, Burns
delivered his own forceful message: The United States knows what you’re up to,
and if you invade Ukraine, you will pay a huge price. He said he was leaving a
letter from Biden, affirming the punishing consequences of any Russian attack on
Ukraine.


CIA Director William J. Burns. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Jabin
Botsford/The Washington Post; iStock)

Putin “was very matter-of-fact,” Burns said. He didn’t deny the intelligence
that pointed toward a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The CIA director also met with another of Putin’s advisers, Nikolai Patrushev,
an ex-KGB officer, from Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, who ran Russia’s
Security Council.

Patrushev had thought Burns flew to Moscow to discuss the next meeting between
Putin and Biden and seemed surprised that the CIA chief had come bearing a
warning about Ukraine.

[The man who has Putin’s ear — and may want his job]

He almost exactly echoed Putin’s grievances about history and NATO in his
discussions with Burns. There seemed to be no room for meaningful engagement,
and it left the CIA director to wonder if Putin and his tight circle of aides
had formed their own echo chamber. Putin had not made an irreversible decision
to go to war, but his views on Ukraine had hardened, his appetite for risk had
grown, and the Russian leader believed his moment of opportunity would soon
pass.

“My level of concern has gone up, not down,” the spy chief reported back to
Biden.


IV




As Burns was speaking with Putin, Blinken was sitting down with Zelensky, in
Glasgow, Scotland, on the sidelines of an international summit on climate
change. He laid out the intelligence picture and described the Russian storm
that was heading Ukraine’s way.

“It was just the two of us, two feet from each other,” Blinken recalled. It was
a “difficult conversation.”

Blinken had met before with the Ukrainian president and thought he knew him well
enough to speak candidly, although it seemed surreal to be “telling someone you
believe their country is going to be invaded.”

He found Zelensky “serious, deliberate, stoic,” a combination of belief and
disbelief. He said he would brief his senior teams. But the Ukrainians had “seen
a number of Russian feints in the past,” Blinken knew, and Zelensky was clearly
worried about economic collapse if his country panicked.

Blinken’s presentation, and Zelensky’s skepticism, set a pattern that would be
repeated both privately and in public over the next several months. The
Ukrainians could not afford to reject U.S. intelligence wholesale. But from
their perspective, the information was speculative.

Play
Zelensky on getting the right weapons to fight Russia



Zelensky heard the U.S. warnings, he later recalled, but said the Americans
weren’t offering the kinds of weapons Ukraine needed to defend itself.

“You can say a million times, ‘Listen, there may be an invasion.’ Okay, there
may be an invasion — will you give us planes?” Zelensky said. “Will you give us
air defenses? ‘Well, you’re not a member of NATO.’ Oh, okay, then what are we
talking about?”

The Americans offered little specific intelligence to support their warnings
“until the last four or five days before the invasion began,” according to
Dmytro Kuleba, Zelensky’s foreign minister.

Less than two weeks after the Glasgow meeting, when Kuleba and Andriy Yermak,
Zelensky’s chief of staff, visited the State Department in Washington, a senior
U.S. official greeted them with a cup of coffee and a smile. “Guys, dig the
trenches!” the official began.

“When we smiled back,” Kuleba recalled, the official said, “ ‘I’m serious. Start
digging trenches. … You will be attacked. A large-scale attack, and you have to
prepare for it.’ We asked for details; there were none.”

If the Americans became frustrated at Ukraine’s skepticism about Russia’s plans,
the Ukrainians were no less disconcerted at the increasingly public U.S.
warnings that an invasion was coming.


Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post;
Serhiy Morgunov for The Washington Post; iStock)

“We had to strike a balance between realistically assessing the risks and
preparing the country for the worst … and keeping the country running
economically and financially,” Kuleba said. “Every comment coming from the
United States about the unavoidability of war was immediately reflected in the
[Ukrainian] currency exchange rate.”

A number of U.S. officials have disputed Ukrainian recollections, saying they
provided the Kyiv government with specific intelligence early on and throughout
the lead-up to the invasion.

Yet when it came to Ukraine, U.S. intelligence was hardly an open book. Official
guidance prohibited the spy agencies from sharing tactical information that
Ukraine could use to launch offensive attacks on Russian troop locations in
Crimea or against Kremlin-backed separatists in the east.

Ukraine’s own intelligence apparatus was also shot through with Russian moles,
and U.S. officials were leery of sensitive information ending up in Moscow’s
hands. After the war began, the Biden administration changed its policy and
shared information on Russian troop movements throughout Ukraine, on the grounds
that the country was now defending itself from an invasion.


V




At a side meeting during the Group of 20 conference in Rome at the end of
October, Biden shared some of the new intelligence and conclusions with
America’s closest allies — the leaders of Britain, France and Germany.

In mid-November, Haines used a previously scheduled trip to Brussels to brief a
wider circle of allies: NATO’s North Atlantic Council, the principal
decision-making body of the 30-member alliance. Speaking in a large auditorium,
she limited her remarks to what the intelligence community believed the evidence
showed, and didn’t offer policy recommendations.

“A number of members raised questions and were skeptical of the idea that
President Putin was seriously preparing for the possibility of a large-scale
invasion,” Haines recalled.

French and German officials couldn’t understand why Putin would try to invade
and occupy a large country with just the 80,000 to 90,000 troops believed to be
massed on the border. Satellite imagery also showed the troops moving back and
forth from the frontier. Others posited that the Russians were performing an
exercise, as the Kremlin itself insisted, or playing a shell game designed to
conceal a purpose short of invasion.


Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. (Emily Sabens/The Washington
Post; Melina Mara/The Washington Post; iStock)

Most were doubtful, and noted that Zelensky seemed to think Russia would never
attack with the ambition and force the Americans were forecasting. Didn’t
Ukraine understand Russia’s intentions best?

Only the British and the Baltic states were fully on board. At one point, an
official from London stood up and gestured toward Haines. “She’s right,” the
official said.

But Paris and Berlin remembered emphatic U.S. claims about intelligence on Iraq.
The shadow of that deeply flawed analysis hung over all the discussions before
the invasion. Some also felt that Washington, just months earlier, had vastly
overestimated the resilience of Afghanistan’s government as the U.S. military
was withdrawing. The government had collapsed as soon as the Taliban entered
Kabul.

“American intelligence is not considered to be a naturally reliable source,”
said François Heisbourg, a security expert and longtime adviser to French
officials. “It was considered to be prone to political manipulation.”

The Europeans began to settle into camps that would change little for several
months.

“I think there were basically three flavors,” a senior administration official
said. To many in Western Europe, what the Russians were doing was “all coercive
diplomacy, [Putin] was just building up to see what he could get. He’s not going
to invade … it’s crazy.”

Many of NATO’s newer members in eastern and southeastern Europe thought Putin
“may do something, but it would be limited in scope,” the official said, “ …
another bite at the [Ukrainian] apple,” similar to what happened in 2014.

But Britain and the Baltic states, which were always nervous about Russian
intentions, believed a full-scale invasion was coming.

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When skeptical member states asked for more intelligence, the Americans provided
some, but held back from sharing it all.

Historically, the United States rarely revealed its most sensitive intelligence
to an organization as diverse as NATO, primarily for fear that secrets could
leak. While the Americans and their British partners did share a significant
amount of information, they withheld the raw intercepts or nature of the human
sources that were essential to determining Putin’s plans. That especially
frustrated French and German officials, who had long suspected that Washington
and London sometimes hid the basis of their intelligence to make it seem more
definitive than it really was.

Some of the alliance countries provided their own findings, Haines said. The
United States also created new mechanisms for sharing information in real time
with their foreign partners in Brussels. Austin, Blinken and Milley were on the
phone to their counterparts, sharing, listening, cajoling.

Over time, one senior European official at NATO recalled, “the intelligence was
narrated repeatedly, consistently, clearly, credibly, in a lot of detail with a
very good script and supporting evidence. I don’t remember one key moment where
the lightbulb went off” in the months-long effort to convince the allies, the
official said. Ultimately, “it was the volume of the lights in the room.”


VI




Macron and Merkel had been dealing with Putin for years and found it hard to
believe he was so irrational as to launch a calamitous war. In the weeks after
Biden’s Geneva meeting, they had tried to arrange an E.U.-Russia summit, only to
be shot down by skeptical members of the bloc who saw it as a dangerous
concession to Russia’s aggressive posture.

Months later, despite the new U.S. intelligence, the French and Germans insisted
there was a chance for diplomacy. The Americans and the British had little hope
that any diplomatic effort would pay off, but were prepared to keep the door
open — if the Europeans gave something in return.

“A big part of our focus,” recalled Sullivan, “was basically to say to them,
‘Look, we’ll take the diplomatic track and treat it [as] serious … if you will
take the planning for [military] force posture and sanctions seriously.’ ”

Each side was convinced it was right but was willing to proceed as if it might
be wrong.

Over the next several months, the Americans strove to show the Western Europeans
and others that they were still willing to search for a peaceful resolution,
even though in the back of their minds, they were convinced that any Russian
efforts at negotiation were a charade. “It basically worked,” Sullivan said of
the administration strategy.

On Dec. 7, Putin and Biden spoke on a video call. Putin claimed that the
eastward expansion of the Western alliance was a major factor in his decision to
send troops to Ukraine’s border. Russia was simply protecting its own interests
and territorial integrity, he argued.


Reporters in a Dec. 7, 2021, news briefing with national security adviser Jake
Sullivan about Biden's video call with Putin. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post;
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post; iStock)

Biden responded that Ukraine was unlikely to join NATO any time soon, and that
the United States and Russia could come to agreements on other concerns Russia
had about the placement of U.S. weapons systems in Europe. In theory, there was
room to compromise.

For a while, as Blinken headed the U.S. diplomatic effort with repeated visits
to NATO capitals and alliance headquarters in Brussels, the Ukrainians continued
their contacts with European governments that still seemed far less convinced of
Putin’s intentions than the Americans were.

Kuleba and others in the government believed there would be a war, the Ukrainian
foreign minister later said. But until the eve of the invasion, “I could not
believe that we would face a war of such scale. The only country in the world
that was persistently telling us” with such certainty “that there would be
missile strikes was the United States of America. … Every other country was not
sharing this analysis and [instead was] saying, yes, war is possible, but it
will be rather a localized conflict in the east of Ukraine.”

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“Put yourself in our shoes,” Kuleba said. “You have, on the one hand, the U.S.
telling you something completely unimaginable, and everyone else blinking an eye
to you and saying this is not what we think is going to happen.”

In fact, the British and some Baltic officials believed a full invasion was
probable. But Kuleba was far from alone in his skepticism. His president shared
it, according to Zelensky’s aides and other officials who briefed him.

“We took all of the information that our Western partners were giving us
seriously,” recalled Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff. “But let’s be honest:
Imagine if all of this panic that so many people were pushing had taken place.
Creating panic is a method of the Russians. … Imagine if this panic had started
three or four months beforehand. What would’ve happened to the economy? Would we
have been able to hold on for five months like we have?”


VII




In early January, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman led a diplomatic
delegation to Geneva and met with Sergei Ryabkov, her Russian counterpart, whom
she knew well. He reiterated Moscow’s position on Ukraine, formally offered in
mid-December in two proposed treaties — that NATO must end its expansion plans
and halt any activity in countries that had joined the alliance after 1997,
which included Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic states.

Rejecting the proposal to close NATO’s doors and reduce the status of existing
members, the administration instead offered talks and trust-building measures in
a number of security areas, including the deployment of troops and the placement
of weapons on NATO’s eastern flank along the border with Russia. The offer was
conditioned on de-escalation of the military threat to Ukraine. Ryabkov told
Sherman that Russia was disappointed in the American attitude.

The White House had envisioned Sherman’s meeting with Ryabkov as “a chance to
test whether the Russians were serious about the substance of the concerns … and
if there was a way forward for any kind of diplomacy,” said Emily Horne, then
the spokesperson for the National Security Council. “I think it became pretty
clear, pretty quickly that [the Russians] were performing diplomacy, not
actually undertaking diplomacy. They weren’t even doing it with much
seriousness.”


Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister
Sergei Ryabkov in Geneva. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Denis
Balibouse/AFP/Getty; iStock)

“All the Western allies wanted to convey that there was an alternative path
involving dialogue and respect for Russia as a great power,” said a senior
British government official involved in negotiations. “What became increasingly
clear was that Russia was not interested in those.”

As the United States pursued the diplomatic track, it also positioned forces to
defend NATO, all of them visible to Moscow and to Europeans and demonstrating
American willingness to put skin in the game. While Biden repeatedly said there
would be no U.S. troops in Ukraine, the Pentagon increased pre-positioned
weapons stocks in Poland and moved a helicopter battalion there from Greece.
Paratroops from the 173rd Airborne were deployed to the Baltic states. More
troops were sent from Italy to eastern Romania, and others went to Hungary and
Bulgaria.

Over the next several months, the U.S. military presence in Europe increased
from 74,000 to 100,000 troops. Four airborne fighter squadrons became 12, and
the number of surface combatant ships in the region increased from five to 26.
Combat air patrols and surveillance were flying 24/7 missions over the
alliance’s eastern flank, with visibility deep inside Ukraine.

[Here's why Putin misjudged the war in Ukraine]

“We were saying, ‘Look, we’re taking diplomacy seriously, but we’re so worried
about this that we’re actually moving men and material,’ ” Sullivan recalled.

With National Security Agency authorization, the United States established a
direct communication line from the Ukrainian military to U.S. European Command.
The highly secure system would keep the Americans in direct contact with their
Ukrainian counterparts as events unfolded.

The administration was also sending arms to Ukraine. In December, Biden
authorized an additional $200 million in weapons to be drawn from U.S.
inventories — even as the Kyiv government, many in Congress and some within the
administration itself argued that if the United States really believed a
full-scale invasion was coming, it was not enough.

But every step in the administration campaign was premised on avoiding direct
U.S. involvement in a military clash. The overriding White House concern about
provocation influenced each decision about how much assistance and what kind of
weapons to give the Ukrainians to defend themselves.

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“I make no apologies for the fact that one of our objectives here is to avoid
direct conflict with Russia,” Sullivan said of the prewar period.

The Russians were going to do what they did regardless of what the allies did, a
senior official involved in the decisions said, and the administration found
“incredible” the notion, as some later argued in hindsight, that “if only we
would have given” the Ukrainians more arms, “none of this would have happened.”

Determining whether Russia would interpret a military exercise or a weapons
shipment as provocative or escalatory was “more art than science,” the official
said. “There’s not a clear and easy mathematical formula. … There has always
been a balance between what is required to effectively defend, and what is going
to be seen by Russia as the United States essentially underwriting the killing
of huge numbers of Russians.”

Ukrainian officials have expressed unending gratitude to the United States for
what it has provided since the start of the war. “No other country in the world
did more for Ukraine to get the necessary weapons than the United States since
24 February. No other country in the world,” Kuleba said recently. But from the
beginning, he said, he and other Ukrainian officials have believed that the
“non-provocation” strategy was the wrong one.

“Where did it take us to?” Kuleba said. “I think this war — with thousands
killed and wounded, territories lost, part of the economy destroyed ... is the
best answer to those who still advocate the non-provocation of Russia.”


VIII




As part of its ongoing campaign to convince the world of what was coming — and
dissuade the Russians — the White House decided toward the end of 2021 to
challenge its own reluctance, and that of the intelligence agencies, to make
some of their most sensitive information public.

U.S. intelligence had picked up on “false flag” operations planned by the
Russians, in which they would stage attacks on their own forces as if they had
come from Ukraine. Publicly exposing those plans might deny Putin the
opportunity to concoct a pretext for invasion, administration officials
reasoned.

As a first step, the White House decided to reveal the scale of the troop
buildup that continued on Ukraine’s borders. In early December, the
administration released satellite photos, as well a map created by U.S. analysts
showing Russian troop positions and an intelligence community analysis of
Russian planning.

The analysis said the Russians planned “extensive movement” of 100 battalion
tactical groups, involving up to 175,000 troops, along with armor, artillery and
equipment. The picture that administration officials had been developing for
weeks in secret was now seen around the world.


National security adviser Jake Sullivan. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post;
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post; iStock)

In anticipation of more selective disclosures of intelligence, Sullivan set up a
regular process at the White House in which a team would determine whether a
particular piece of information, if made public, could thwart Russian plans or
propaganda. If the answer was yes, it would then be submitted to the
intelligence community for recommendations on whether and how to release it.

In late January, the British government publicly accused Russia of plotting to
install a puppet regime in Kyiv. The allegation, based on U.S. and British
intelligence, was revealed in a highly unusual press statement by Foreign
Secretary Liz Truss, late in the evening in London but just in time for the
Sunday morning papers.

And in early February, the Biden administration disclosed that Moscow was
considering filming a fake Ukrainian attack against Russian territory or
Russian-speaking people — the false flag that intelligence had detected. The
propaganda film would be heavy on spectacle, officials said, with graphic scenes
of explosions, accompanied by corpses posed as victims and mourners pretending
to grieve for the dead.

“I had watched Putin falsely set the narrative too many times,” another U.S.
official said. Now, “you could see him planning quite specifically in [eastern
Ukraine] false flags. It was quite precise.”

The intelligence disclosures themselves had an air of theatricality. The initial
revelation of satellite pictures could be corroborated by commercial footage,
though the analysis was unique to the intelligence community. But whether the
public believed the subsequent disclosures depended on the government’s
credibility. And Biden administration officials knew they faced a public, at
home and abroad, that could be deeply skeptical of “intelligence,” following the
Iraq War and the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.

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Broadly speaking, the U.S. public information campaign worked. World attention
focused on the Russian troop buildup. The idea that Putin would falsify the
reasons for his invasion seemed plausible, perhaps because in 2014 he had denied
entirely that his troops were in Crimea, an assertion that led to descriptions
of “little green men” in military uniforms without insignia occupying part of
Ukraine.

Given how skeptical some allies remained about the intelligence, the most
powerful effect of disclosing it was to shape Russian behavior and deprive Putin
of the power to use misinformation, U.S. officials said.


IX




On Jan. 12, Burns met in Kyiv with Zelensky and delivered a candid assessment.
The intelligence picture had only become clearer that Russia intended to make a
lightning strike on Kyiv and decapitate the central government. The United
States had also discovered a key piece of battlefield planning: Russia would try
to land its forces first at the airport in Hostomel, a suburb of the capital,
where the runways could accommodate massive Russian transports carrying troops
and weapons. The assault on Kyiv would begin there.

At one point in their conversation, Zelensky asked if he or his family were
personally in danger. Burns said Zelensky needed to take his personal security
seriously.

The risks to the president were growing. Intelligence at the time indicated that
Russian assassination teams might already be in Kyiv, waiting to be activated.

Play
Zelensky on downplaying the threat of war to Ukrainians



But Zelensky resisted calls to relocate his government and was adamant that he
not panic the public. Down that path, he thought, lay defeat.

“You can’t simply say to me, ‘Listen, you should start to prepare people now and
tell them they need to put away money, they need to store up food,’ ” Zelensky
recalled. “If we had communicated that — and that is what some people wanted,
who I will not name — then I would have been losing $7 billion a month since
last October, and at the moment when the Russians did attack, they would have
taken us in three days. ... Generally, our inner sense was right: If we sow
chaos among people before the invasion, the Russians will devour us. Because
during chaos, people flee the country.”

For Zelensky, the decision to keep people in the country, where they could fight
to defend their homes, was the key to repelling any invasion.

“As cynical as it may sound, those are the people who stopped everything,” he
said.

Ukrainian officials remained irritated that the Americans weren’t sharing more
about their intelligence sources. “The information that we received was, I would
call it, a statement of facts without a disclosure of the origins of those facts
or of the background behind those facts,” Kuleba recalled.

But Western intelligence wasn’t alone in thinking Zelensky should prepare for a
full-scale invasion. Some of Ukraine’s own intelligence officials, while still
skeptical that Putin would strike, were planning for the worst. Kyrylo Budanov,
Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, said he moved the archives out of his
headquarters three months in advance of the war and prepared reserves of fuel
and ammunition.


Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, in Jan. 21 meeting in Geneva with
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (not shown). (Emily Sabens/The Washington
Post; Anadolu Agency/Getty; iStock)

The American warnings were repeated on Jan. 19 when Blinken made a brief visit
to Kyiv for a face-to-face meeting with Zelensky and Kuleba. To the secretary’s
dismay, Zelensky continued to argue that any public call for mobilization would
bring panic, as well as capital flight that would push Ukraine’s already
teetering economy over the edge.

While Blinken stressed, as he had in previous conversations, the importance of
keeping Zelensky and his government safe and intact, he was one of several
senior U.S. officials who rebuffed reports that the administration had urged
them to evacuate the capital. “What we said to Ukraine were two things,” Blinken
later recalled. “We will support you whatever you want to do. We recommend you
look … at how you can ensure continuity of government operations depending on
what happens.” That could mean hunkering down in Kyiv, relocating to western
Ukraine or moving the government to neighboring Poland.

Zelensky told Blinken he was staying.

He had begun to suspect that some Western officials wanted him to flee so that
Russia could install a puppet government that would come to a negotiated
settlement with NATO powers. “The Western partners wanted to — I’m sure someone
was really worried about what would happen to me and my family,” Zelensky said.
“But someone probably wanted to just end things faster. I think the majority of
people who called me — well, almost everyone — did not have faith that Ukraine
can stand up to this and persevere.”

Similarly, warning Ukrainians to prepare for war as some partners wanted him to,
he said, would have weakened the country economically and made it easier for the
Russians to capture. “Let people discuss in the future whether it was right or
not right,” the Ukrainian leader recalled, “but I definitely know and
intuitively — we discussed this every day at the National Security and Defense
Council, et cetera — I had the feeling that [the Russians] wanted to prepare us
for a soft surrender of the country. And that’s scary.”


X




In a news conference on Jan. 19, Biden said he thought Russia would invade.
Putin had come too far to pull back. “He has to do something,” the president
said.

Biden promised that the West would answer Russia’s attack. “Our allies and
partners are ready to impose severe costs and significant harm on Russia and the
Russian economy,” he said, predicting that if Putin ordered an invasion, it
would prove a “disaster” for Russia.

It was one of Biden’s most forceful warnings to that point. But the president
also muddied the waters, suggesting that a “minor incursion” by Russian forces,
as opposed to a full-scale invasion, might not prompt the severe response that
he and allies had threatened.

“It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having to fight
about what to do and not do, et cetera,” Biden said, signaling that NATO was not
unified in its opposition to any Russian use of force. “If there’s something
where there’s Russian forces crossing the border, killing Ukrainian fighters, et
cetera, I think that changes everything,” Biden said when, later in the news
conference, a reporter asked him to clarify what he meant by a “minor
incursion.”

“But it depends on what he [Putin] does, actually, what extent we’re going to be
able to get total unity on the NATO front.”


Biden at the Jan. 19 news conference where he said he thought Russia would
invade. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Demetrius Freeman/The Washington
Post; iStock)

Biden’s comments revealed the cracks in his own administration’s planning, as
well as in NATO. Blinken was in Kyiv, vowing that the United States would
support Ukraine, in every way short of committing its own forces, if the country
was attacked. But privately, administration officials had been contemplating for
weeks how they would respond to a “hybrid” attack, in which Russia might launch
damaging cyber-strikes on Ukraine and a limited assault on the eastern part of
the country.

Zelensky and his aides, who still weren’t convinced Putin would go to war,
replied to Biden’s comments about a “minor incursion” with a caustic tweet.

“We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small
nations. Just as there are no minor casualties and little grief from the loss of
loved ones. I say this as the President of a great power.”

Biden clarified the next day that if “any assembled Russian units move across
the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion” for which Putin will pay. But White
House officials quietly fumed that while the administration was trying to rally
support for Ukraine, Zelensky was more interested in poking the president in the
eye over an awkward comment.

[Six ways Russia views Ukraine]

“It was frustrating,” said a former White House official. “We were taking steps
that were attempting to help him, and there was a feeling that he was protecting
his own political brand by either being in denial or projecting confidence
because that’s what was important to him at the time.”

An aide to Zelensky who helped craft the tweet said it was meant to rebut Biden,
but also to be light and humorous, a way to defuse the burgeoning tension.
Zelensky’s inner circle worried that Washington’s predictions that war was
around the corner would have unintended consequences.

As Biden was clarifying, Zelensky’s team tried to assuage Washington with a
conciliatory message.

“Thank you @POTUS for the unprecedented [U.S.] diplomatic and military
assistance for [Ukraine],” Zelensky tweeted, with emoji of the U.S. and
Ukrainian flags.


XI




Jan. 21 was a cold, bleak day in Geneva, with gusty winds whipping the surface
of the usually placid lake that shares the Swiss city’s name. As Blinken and his
aides sat across from their Russian counterparts at a table set up in the
ballroom of a shoreline luxury hotel, the secretary offered the whitecaps as a
metaphor. Perhaps, Blinken told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, they
could calm the turbulent waters between their two countries.

They exchanged tense niceties and covered other issues — a spat about the size
and activities of their embassies in each other’s capital, the Iran nuclear deal
— before turning to Ukraine. Blinken again laid out U.S. positions. If Putin had
legitimate security concerns, the United States and its allies were ready to
talk about them. But once an invasion of Ukraine began, Western sanctions would
be fast and merciless, isolating Russia and crippling its economy, and the
alliance would provide Ukraine with massive military assistance. If one Russian
soldier or missile touched one inch of NATO territory, the United States would
defend its allies.

Blinken found Lavrov’s responses strident and unyielding. After an hour and a
half of fruitless back-and-forth, it seemed there was little more to say. But as
their aides began to file out of the ballroom, Blinken held back and asked the
Russian minister to speak with him alone. The two men entered a small, adjacent
conference room and shut the door as the U.S. and Russian teams stood
uncomfortably together outside.


Blinken and Lavrov before their Jan. 21 meeting in Geneva. (Emily Sabens/The
Washington Post; Alex Brandon/AFP/Getty; iStock)

During Lavrov’s nearly 18 years as Russia’s foreign minister, a succession of
American diplomats had found him blunt and doctrinaire, but occasionally frank
and realistic about relations between their two countries. After again going
over the Ukraine situation, Blinken stopped and asked, “Sergei, tell me what it
is you’re really trying to do?” Was this all really about the security concerns
Russia had raised again and again — about NATO’s “encroachment” toward Russia
and a perceived military threat? Or was it about Putin’s almost theological
belief that Ukraine was and always had been an integral part of Mother Russia?

Without answering, Lavrov opened the door and walked away, his staff trailing
behind.

It was the last time top national security officials of Russia and the United
States would meet in person before the invasion.

Biden spoke with Putin once more by telephone. On Feb. 12, the White House said,
he told the Russian president that “while the United States remains prepared to
engage in diplomacy, in full coordination with our allies and partners, we are
equally prepared for other scenarios.”


XII




A day earlier, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace had flown to Moscow to meet
with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, a longtime Kremlin survivor who
helped sculpt Putin’s tough-guy persona.

Wallace wanted to ask one more time if there was room for negotiation on Putin’s
demands about NATO expansion and alliance activities in Eastern Europe. The
Russians, he said, showed no interest in engaging.

Wallace warned Shoigu that Russia would face fierce resistance if it invaded
Ukraine. “I know the Ukrainians — I visited Ukraine five times — and they will
fight.”

“My mother’s Ukrainian,” Wallace said Shoigu replied, implying that he knew the
people better. “It’s all part of our same country.”

Wallace then raised the prospect of sanctions. Shoigu responded: “ ‘We can
suffer like no one else.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want anyone to suffer.’ ”

Shoigu aired a long and by now familiar list of complaints and said Russia
couldn’t tolerate Ukraine’s Western trajectory. “It was in some respects
incomprehensible,” said a British official who attended the meeting. “Everyone
wanted to keep negotiations going — we were throwing off-ramps, but they weren’t
taking them.”

As the British officials were about to leave, Shoigu spoke directly to Wallace.
“He looked me in the eye and said, ‘We have no plans to invade Ukraine’ ”
Wallace recalled. “That shows you how much of a lie it was.”


British Defense Minister Ben Wallace, right, with Russian counterpart Sergei
Shoigu. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Tim Hammond/MoD Crown
Copyright/Getty; iStock)

A week later, on Feb. 18, Biden called the leaders of several NATO allies and
told them the latest U.S. analysis. Biden told reporters in the Roosevelt Room
at the White House later that day, “As of this moment, I’m convinced he’s made
the decision” to invade. “We have reason to believe that.”

The French, however, continued to seek a way out of the crisis.

On Feb. 20, Macron called Putin and asked him to agree to a meeting in Geneva
with Biden. The conversation led the French president to believe that Putin was
finally willing to seek a settlement.

“It’s a proposal that merits to be taken into account,” Putin said, according to
a recording of the conversation aired months later in a France TV documentary,
“A President, Europe and War.”

Macron pressed the Russian leader. “But can we say, today, at the end of this
conversation, that we agree in principle? I would like a clear answer from you
on that score. I understand your resistance to setting a date. But are you ready
to move forward and say, today, ‘I would like a [face-to-face] meeting with the
Americans, then expanded to the Europeans’? Or not?”

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Putin didn’t commit and appeared to have more-pressing matters at hand. “To be
perfectly frank with you, I wanted to go [play] ice hockey, because right now
I’m at the gym. But before starting my workout, let me assure you, I will first
call my advisers.”

“Je vous remercie, Monsieur le President,” Putin concluded, thanking him in
French.

Macron is heard laughing in delight as he hangs up. The French president and his
advisers thought they had a breakthrough. Macron’s diplomatic adviser, Emmanuel
Bonne, even danced.

But the following day, in a televised address, Putin officially recognized two
separatist Ukrainian provinces in Donbas, including territory controlled by
Kyiv, as independent states. It was a stark sign that Putin — his
French-language pleasantries aside — intended to dismember Ukraine.


XIII




As Britain and France made last-ditch efforts at diplomacy, world leaders
gathered in Munich for an annual security conference. Zelensky attended,
prompting concerns among some U.S. officials that his absence might give Russia
the perfect moment to strike. Others wondered if the Ukrainian leader believed
Russia would attack and had used the opportunity to leave the country before the
bombs started falling.

In a speech, Zelensky reminded the audience that his country was already at war
with Russia, with Ukrainian troops fighting against the eastern separatists
since 2014.

“To really help Ukraine, it is not necessary to constantly talk only about the
dates of a probable invasion,” Zelensky said. Instead, the European Union and
NATO should welcome Ukraine into their organizations.

Some European officials were still unconvinced that an attack was coming. One
told a reporter, “We have no clear evidence ourselves that Putin has made up his
mind, and we have not seen anything that would suggest otherwise.”

“It felt otherworldly,” the British official said. In sideline conversations,
U.S. and British officials were convinced of an imminent invasion, but “that
just wasn’t the mood in the hall.”

Some in London began to doubt themselves, the British official said. “People
were saying [we] got it wrong on Afghanistan. We returned and scrubbed the
[Ukraine] intelligence again.”


Zelensky in an interview with The Post at his office in Kyiv on Aug. 8. (Emily
Sabens/The Washington Post; Heidi Levine for The Washington Post; iStock)

They came up with the same conclusion — Russia would invade. But despite the
U.S. diplomatic and intelligence-sharing campaign, it remained a difficult sell.

“If you discover the plans of somebody to attack a country and the plans appear
to be completely bonkers, the chances are that you are going to react rationally
and consider that it’s so bonkers, it’s not going to happen,” said Heisbourg,
the French security expert.

“The Europeans overrated their understanding of Putin,” he said. “The Americans,
I assume … rather than try to put themselves in Putin’s head, decided they were
going to act on the basis of the data and not worry about whether it makes any
sense or not.”

There had been many reasons to be mystified. U.S. intelligence showed that the
Kremlin’s war plans were not making their way down to the battlefield commanders
who would have to carry them out. Officers didn’t know their orders. Troops were
showing up at the border not understanding they were heading into war. Some U.S.
government analysts were bewildered by the lack of communication within the
Russian military. Things were so screwy, the analysts thought, Russia’s plans
might actually fail. But that remained a distinctly minority view.

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For Kuleba, the turning point came in the days after the Feb. 18-20 Munich
conference, when he traveled again to Washington. “These were the days I
received more-specific information,” he recalled. At a specific airport A in
Russia, they told him, five transport planes were already on full alert, ready
to take paratroops at any given moment and fly them in the direction of a
specific airport B in Ukraine.

“That was where you see the sequence of events and the logic of what is
happening,” he said.

Western intelligence officials, looking back at what turned out to be the
shambolic Russian attack on Kyiv, acknowledge that they overestimated the
effectiveness of the Russian military.

“We assumed they would invade a country the way we would have invaded a
country,” one British official said.


XIV




Early in the evening of Feb. 23, the White House received an urgent intelligence
flash. There was “high probability” that the invasion had begun. Troops were on
the move, and the Russians had fired missiles on targets in Ukraine. The
president’s top advisers assembled; some met in the Situation Room while others
joined on a secure line.

Sullivan spoke with Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff. There was “an extremely
high level of agitation” in Kyiv, said a person familiar with the call. “They
were not spinning out of control. Just extremely emotional, but in a way you’d
expect.”

Yermak told Sullivan to hold on — he wanted to bring Zelensky to the phone to
speak directly with Biden. Sullivan connected the call to the Treaty Room, part
of the second-floor White House residence used as a study, and got the president
on the line.

Zelensky implored Biden to immediately contact as many other world leaders and
diplomats as possible. He should tell them to speak out publicly and to call
Putin directly and tell him to “turn this off.”

“Zelensky was alarmed,” the person recalled. He asked Biden to “ ‘get us all the
intelligence you possibly can now. We will fight, we will defend, we can hold,
but we need your help.’ ”

Harris reported from Washington and London; DeYoung from Washington, Brussels,
and Joint Base Ramstein and Stuttgart in Germany; Khurshudyan from Kyiv; Parker
from Washington; and Sly from London. Paul Sonne and Olivier Knox in Washington,
Souad Mekhennet in Berlin, Rick Noack in Paris and Serhiy Morgunov in Kyiv
contributed to this report.

Russia's Gamble
Wp
Hand-curated
Road to war: U.S. struggled to convince allies, and Zelensky, of risk of
invasion
Aug. 16, 2022
Russia’s spies misread Ukraine and misled Kremlin as war loomed
Aug. 19, 2022
Battle for Kyiv: Ukrainian valor, Russian blunders combined to save the capital
Aug. 24, 2022
An interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
Aug. 23, 2022
The Post examined the lead-up to the Ukraine war. Here’s what we learned.
Aug. 16, 2022
5 things you need to know about Russia’s intelligence failures ahead of the
invasion of Ukraine
Aug. 19, 2022
View all 6 storiesChevronDown

CORRECTION

A previous version of this article incorrectly said that U.S. paratroops from
the 171st Airborne were deployed to the Baltic states before the war. They were
from the 173rd Airborne. The article has been corrected.

ABOUT THIS STORY

Editing by Peter Finn. Copy editing by Martha Murdock and Tom Justice. Photo
editing by Chloe Coleman. Video filming by Whitney Leaming. Video editing by
Jason Aldag. Design and development by Garland Potts and Emily Sabens. Design
editing by Joe Moore. Project management by Jay Wang.

By Shane Harris
Shane Harris covers intelligence and national security for The Washington Post.
He has been a writer at the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast and Foreign
Policy, among other publications. He has written two books, "The Watchers" and
"@War." Twitter Twitter
By Karen DeYoung
Karen DeYoung is associate editor and senior national security correspondent for
The Post. In more than three decades at the paper, she has served as bureau
chief in Latin America and in London and as correspondent covering the White
House, U.S. foreign policy and the intelligence community. Twitter Twitter
By Isabelle Khurshudyan
Isabelle Khurshudyan is a foreign correspondent based in Kyiv. A University of
South Carolina graduate, she has worked at The Washington Post since 2014,
previously as a correspondent in the Moscow bureau and as a sports reporter
covering the Washington Capitals. Twitter Twitter
By Ashley Parker
Ashley Parker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. She was
part of the Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2018,
for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election. She joined The
Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times. Parker is also an on-air
contributor to NBC News and MSNBC. Twitter Twitter
By Liz Sly
Liz Sly is a correspondent-at-large covering global affairs. She has spent more
than 17 years covering the Middle East, including the first and second Iraq
wars. Other postings include Washington, Africa, China, Afghanistan and Italy.
Twitter Twitter

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and/or access information on a device. Create a personalised ads profile. Select
personalised ads. Create a personalised content profile. Select personalised
content. Measure ad performance. Measure content performance. Apply market
research to generate audience insights. Develop and improve products. View list
of partners

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