“Breathe deeply, calm down, and don’t go running to stock up on food and matches,” President Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrainians one month before the Russian tanks rolled across the border on Feb. 24, 2022. The American and British intelligence services knew the Russians were going to invade and told him so, but neither he nor his generals believed it.
Most of the European NATO members didn’t believe it either. That was partly because they still remembered the lies that the CIA and MI6 told them 20 years before to trick them into invading Iraq, but mainly because they couldn’t believe the Russians were that stupid.
Looking back much later, one European intelligence official explained that “We didn’t believe it would happen, because we thought the idea that (the Russians) would be able to walk into Kyiv and just install a puppet government was completely insane.” After a pause, he added defensively: “As it turned out, it was indeed completely insane.”
