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https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-top-ukraine-intel-official-this-is-where-putin-failed-1.10697255
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Zelenskyy is fully aware of the world’s short attention span and that after a month of intense fighting, with no end in sight, Ukraine’s troubles may no longer remain at the top of the global agenda. But it’s not just world opinion – and with it the military and diplomatic support that Ukraine has been receiving from the West – that Zelenskyy is worried about.
He needs primarily to convince his own public, who are just starting to get used to the idea that they are now looking at the prospect of a prolonged war that could take many more months, even years, that they will continue to enjoy that support in dark days to come.
The Ukrainian people have surprised everyone, including themselves, by sticking together and standing up to the vastly superior Russian army. But continuing to do so, once the first flush of success on the battlefield has passed, will be much more difficult.
While Zelenskyy as president is the figurehead, there is a whole team of people running the war effort, the military and intelligence services, the civilian infrastructure and economy. In the early hours of the war, there was fear of a Russian “decapitation operation” to try to take out Zelenskyy and as many of Ukraine’s most senior officials, in order to render the country leaderless. These plans failed, partly due to information passed on in advance by Western intelligence agencies.
Members of this group are rarely together in the same room. They operate autonomously, from secret locations, and hold meetings over secure video conference lines. Earlier this week, one of them – a very senior intelligence official who cannot be named – met in a nondescript and empty office building in a drab, residential part of Kyiv with reporters from three news organizations, including Haaretz. He offered his assessment of how the war has been going so far and his hopes, but mainly concerns, for the future.
Like his boss Zelenskyy, the senior official had also grown a wartime beard, but he preferred a comfortable sweater to the president’s camouflage fatigues. Throughout the interview, he affected the impression of a bemused academic – though often the urgency he felt broke through in mid-sentence.
His biggest worry, he said at the start of the interview, is that “Putin is trying to turn Ukraine into Syria.” He returned to that theme at the end of the interview as well. “I’m very afraid of a protracted war and I’m really afraid of a Syria scenario,” he said. “I hope we will avoid it, but it’s only been 25 days.”
He was encouraged by the way Ukraine’s army and society in general has withstood the war so far, but he reminded us that “Ukraine has a strong tradition of revolutions, a strong rebellious streak. Ukraine was born in a revolution of Cossacks in the 17th century.”
In other words, while Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine is not a real nation with its own history is false, it hasn’t got a great record of keeping together as a political entity either.
Fractious politics was one of the reasons Ukraine’s intelligence community was skeptical until the very last moment that war would break out, which it finally did on February 24. The assessment of the senior official was that “Putin so far has been extremely successful, and in Ukraine, within one year, one year and a half, he could achieve his goals. Without a war. I thought that one month ago. If he hadn’t started the war, it would have been possible for him to achieve his goals – at least to destabilize Ukraine. We were in an extremely dangerous and extremely controversial political landscape. The [approval] rating of Zelenskyy was 21 percent just before the war.”
There were other reasons for skepticism, despite Ukraine’s Western allies supplying it with intelligence about Putin’s war intentions which, in hindsight, proved to be “precise.”
“We have been waiting for a crisis, some deep crisis. But to be honest, we didn’t see real preparations” on the Russian side, the official said.
Despite all the soldiers and military equipment Russia had been accumulating on Ukraine’s borders, the Ukrainians still thought Putin was bluffing because orders had not gone through to the tactical commanders of the Russian army.
“When you send military equipment, tanks, etc., and when you send soldiers, the military people – the commanders – need maybe two weeks to coordinate with each other. Even in the last days before the invasion, there were no tactical preparations. It’s impossible to push the war without this kind of preparation – and it’s the reason why they were so unsuccessful.”
But he said he remained “a pessimist by nature,” despite the unexpected successes of the Ukrainian army and what looks like an ongoing failure of the Russians to achieve their objectives.
“They are fully aware that the first step was unsuccessful,” he said. “But it’s normal for the Russian army. In the Finland war [the Winter War of 1939, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland], the first wave wasn’t successful and the second wave, after preparation, was successful.
“I would be very happy,” he added, if the military setback would also mark the beginning of the end for the Putin regime. “But I have to prepare for prolonged war. If it ends tomorrow, then that’s brilliant. But if not?”
For the Ukrainian leadership, psychologically preparing the nation for a long war that will also have setbacks and disasters is the most important issue. “For the Russian army, this war is a natural disaster,” he said. “Moscow is disappointed” – but they can go on. Unless there’s a sudden political change in the shape of a Kremlin palace coup, the Russian army will continue fighting.
“They will try to continue as long as they are able to,” even if that means exhausting all the resources the Russians still have in the field. “They will try to encircle Kyiv, and in the south to capture Mykolaiv and Odessa – which so far wasn’t attacked because of a storm at sea [which made it difficult for the Russian Navy to land forces on the Black Sea coast]. They will act upon Soviet doctrine and launch another wave of 10 to 15 days.”
The Russians will also try to force the Belarusian army to join the war as reinforcements, and bring mercenaries from war-torn countries where Russia is involved such as Syria, Libya and Mali.
“I’m very pessimistic about the negotiations,” the official said. “But we’re working. It’s a chance and we continue to work with these negotiations. We are working on them because there’s a chance, and we will continue trying,” despite the Russians sending second-tier representatives to the talks.
“We’re ready to talk about neutrality. About Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk. But they want” to make “claims for sovereignty of other regions. They tried to organize now a Kherson’s People Republic,” he added, referring to the only major Ukrainian city Russia has captured thus far, in the east, where the mainly Russian-speaking population has been going out daily to protest against the Russian occupiers.
Russia has arrested the city’s mayor and replaced him with a collaborator, and the Ukrainian government believes the next step will be to announce a referendum like the one that took place in 2014 in Crimea and paved the way for its annexation.
The older members of Zelenskyy’s team – those in their late forties and fifties – were educated in the Soviet Union and are well acquainted with Moscow’s way of thinking. But they chose to build a new Ukrainian society. Perhaps this is the key to the events of the last month. The Ukrainian leadership knows the old Russia well, and they have taken a different path to the future, while Putin is trying to drag his country back into the past – with its unrealistic, czarist, imperial ambition, and is incapable of understanding his adversaries.
The official refused to confirm or deny from his own sources the recent reports emanating from Russia that senior officials in the FSB – Russia’s internal security and intelligence agency, which is also in charge of assessing Ukraine – have been fired and put under house arrest for supplying the Kremlin with erroneous information before the war. But he did say that the reports are “highly likely.”
And yet he remained wary of predicting Ukraine’s future. Like every other civil servant in Kyiv, he has been disappointed so many times during the previous three decades of political instability as he saw how endemic corruption ate away at successive governments.
“The situation is bad. The old Ukraine is dying and our political scene has changed dramatically. Not everyone understands that. The new Ukraine is now being defined,” he summed up. “It will be a very, very different country, and it will absolutely depend on what happens on the battlefield. I am very afraid of a protracted war.”