The Rest Is Classified - 34. Putin's War: The Battle for Kyiv (Ep 4)

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

What did the West know about Russia’s invasion before it happened? How did Ukraine prepare for a war they weren’t sure would come? And why did Moscow underestimate its opponent so disastrously? Western intelligence agencies warned that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine - but even they were surprised by how badly Moscow’s strategy would unravel. From supply chain breakdowns to failed attempts at a decapitation strike on Kyiv, the war’s first days exposed deep weaknesses in Russia’s military machine. Listen as Gordon and David conclude their series on the Russia-Ukraine War and reveal the hidden intelligence failures and military miscalculations that shaped the war’s opening moments. ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good evening, everyone. I want everyone to know that we are still in the Capitol, in our home. The leader of the presidential party is here. The head of the presidential office is here. The prime minister is here. The president is here. We are all here. Our soldiers are here.

Citizens are here. We are all here protecting our independence and our country. And it will stay like that. Glory to the heroes. Glory to Ukraine. Welcome to the Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Golden Carrera. And that was not Vladimir Putin.

That was Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine speaking in just the hours after his country had been invaded by the Russians in 2022. He is, of course, saying that he is going to stay in the Capitol. He is not going to flee and he is trying to rally his public and his military to stand up and fight against the Russians. And Gordon, I guess where we last left President Zelensky, he had been woken in the early hours of February 24th, 2022, told that the Russians were invading. You can hear the sound of missiles, rocket fire outside. And we covered in the last episode, this sort of momentous battle for Hostemel Airport just outside Kiev, the role that intelligence played in that battle.

And now we are going back, I guess, to look at Zelensky and really how he starts to absorb all of this information coming in, some of it from the CIA, some of it from the CIA, some of it from MI6, some of it from his own intelligence services to really shape and direct the first hours and days of this war effort. That's right. And it's a transformation for Zelensky because he hadn't believed that the invasion was coming, as we've heard before. In the opening hours, people are telling him to flee.

I mean, president Biden is advising him to flee and offering him help to do this. He gets frustrated. Now the famous quote is the fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride. Now that he may not have actually said that. So that is disappointing. It is disappointed. Say that.

Did someone say it? Well, it's been attributed, but a few of his aides have said, no, I may not say that, but the sentiment I think is right. And as you know, you were reading that message. He records that on a mobile phone out on the street, the night after his country has been invaded, the point being we are still here, we have not fled. And that's important because one of the things we talked about was the fact that the CIA had passed intelligence saying there were assassination teams out there looking for

him. There were teams already in the Capitol, undercover, trying to take him down. Teams are from the Wagner mercenary group, Chet Chien assassins, it's thought, sleeper cells who'd been there ready and been waiting in safe houses with missions to help take the capital but specifically to kill Zelensky himself. And it looks like it was a pretty close run thing. At one point his bodyguards burst into the Ukrainian equivalent of the Situation Room because they think some of these assassins are perhaps only a few blocks away and they bundle Zelensky down into a bunker.

And it's interesting because they have a really big bunker complex under Kyiv. I've been to Kyiv and I remember asking someone from the Ukrainian government, you know, how big are the bunkers? And I was kind of asking, could I have a look? And I think the answer was no, but they're massive. And these were built, I think, in Soviet days in case of nuclear war for the leadership to be able to go down there. So I think they're really deep, large underground bunker systems into which he can retreat. But that's why that video of him going out on the mobile phone and saying, look, we're here is so important because he's making himself visible. Also, I think he's given secure sat phones so the Russians can't track him. So there is a real sense that he's in danger and that there's danger around him in the

capital. He also famously changes out from his suit into those camo fatigues, the kind of army fleece that becomes so familiar and he stops shaving as much. It's part of a visual transformation, isn't it, about solidarity with the fighters rather than looking like a politician. This is an interesting moment where there's so many different, I guess, systemic things going on here, right? But this is a point where you'd say the actual personality of the guy matters a lot, right?

Because he could have fled. And in fact, it seems like that was probably the base case in a lot of Western capitals was assuming that if this thing got too bad, he was just going to get out. And he could have done that. And I think that would not have been a surprise, but he makes a different choice, right? He makes the choice to stay and to fight. And you know, even though it's disappointing, he did not say, I need ammo, not a ride. To your point, the vibe is very much that, is that he's gonna stick this thing out and

really attempt to push the Russians out of Ukraine. Now, there's an interesting counterfactual I should say that if the Russians had managed to kill him, and by the way, this is like right out of a crazy spy thriller because you literally do have teams of Chechen and Wagner assassins sort of roaming the capital looking for Volodymyr Zelensky, right, and they don't get him. I mean, you do have to wonder if they get him, if they get significant portions of the Ukrainian leadership, if this part of the Russian plan succeeds, maybe all of a sudden this doesn't end up looking so crazy three years later from the standpoint of the Russian behavior, that maybe Ukraine does sort of melt

away if they're able to get to the leadership and they're not able to. I think that's right. I think leadership in wartime matters. When you think of Churchill in World War II and the role he played in rallying the nation, in that case on radio and sending out a message about standing firm in Britain in its darkest hour and Zelensky grows into the role, I think, in that way, which is really interesting. One of the ways, I think, of course, is he is an actor and a comedian. Now, on the one hand, that had led people like Putin to dismiss him as being a lightweight, but I do think

those skills of being an actor, a TV producer, if you like, make him understand how to project himself at this moment. He's also got the instinctive understanding of modern communications, of things like social media, of the use of a mobile phone video. In a way, for instance, Putin has no idea about, you know, Putin, it's all the traditional stuff standing in front of TV cameras. He's sitting at long tables writing 5,000 word essays about the unity of Russia and Ukraine.

Yeah. He's not on TikTok. Whereas Zelensky is in his camo out on the streets going, I'm still here filming on a mobile phone. So that generational and cultural difference, I think becomes very important for Ukraine in its ability to maintain communications within the country, but also to build alliances and support on the outside.

Because Ledzky plays a huge role in becoming this figurehead of resistance and it is a transformative role for him. So I think it's really an interesting case study of where it's the right figure at the right time to exploit even modern technology and the power of communications to help galvanize support for his country. Yeah, and I wonder, going back to the intelligence side of this, so there is a particular species of analyst at CIA called a leadership analyst. And one of the products that they produce is what's known as an LP, a leadership profile, and it's usually a couple pages of the relevant sort of biographical information on a world leader, and usually an assessment of their psychology. There's input

from the agency doctors and psychologists into these things. I actually think they're great reads, which I wouldn't say of every analytic product at the CIA, but they're very interesting. And I have wondered in the years since what Volodymyr Zelensky's LP read in February of 2022, because you have to think that the actions are sort of trying to predict what a politician like him might do when presented with a situation like this. You're sort of reaching the limits of human cognition in many ways, because Zelensky probably also may not have had any idea that he actually possessed, frankly, the courage and the determination to stay. There must have been a PDB written in the run up to the war trying to predict what Zelensky

might do or at least putting scenarios out there. And you have to think based on the way maybe Burns interacted with him or certainly what Biden said that the base case was that he was going to run. He was more stubborn. Interesting enough, I mean, going back to that issue of he changes into the camos. Of course, this becomes an issue in that recent meeting where he goes to the Oval Office to meet President Trump and JD Vance and he's not wearing a suit and it becomes a big deal. And of course, people at the time were like, well, why is he not wearing a suit?

You know, why doesn't he seem willing to do it? He dresses slightly smarter for it. But actually, it was the sign of disrespect. This goes back to that opening moment of the war where he has changed out of his suit deliberately to show solidarity and signal that until the war's over he's going to be with the fighters. So I think that's important and things are in the balance in these opening days. I think that's what's really clear. People are starting to flee Kiev. Suddenly this huge refugee flows going out there. Zelensky is saying

we'll give weapons to anyone who wants to defend the country. So people are kind of reporting to police stations elsewhere just picking up automatic rifles, getting ready to fight because they think the Russians are coming. And the Russians really are are coming. The barricades are going up, the sandbags are going up, people are dismantling road signs, which is something they did in Britain in World War II when they thought the Germans were going to invade, to confuse the invaders so they don't follow the road signs and know where to go. So they really are making these preparations and the reason is that there are about 35

to 40,000 Russian troops heading straight for Kiev. Down from Belarus in a column, a 40 mile long column of Russian armour and troops, thousands of vehicles. People are looking at that. People are looking at it on satellite imagery and they're thinking, well, that's it. This is going to take Kiev. They may not have got Hostomel Airport as we heard previously to have that air bridge to be able to land troops, but they've still got 35 or 40,000 troops heading down towards Kyiv and the pressure on the capital is intense. But this is where I think at least some Ukrainian preparations did make a big difference because as we heard in a previous episode, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, who is the chief of the Ukrainian military, does appear to have made some very quiet preparations.

A few of them were crucial. One was hiding some of the Ukrainian air defenses and aircraft. That is crucial because it means the Russians haven't got air superiority, so they're not able to control the skies in the way that perhaps you'd expect to in a typical battle. I think that's crucial. And the solution is to realise that you can play a bit of that insurgency and resistance strategy that we talked about them planning for against that column of Russian armour coming down. Because in a sense, it looks very intimidating, doesn't it? A 40 mile long column of Russian armour. But it's also a sitting duck in some ways because what you've got is you've got Ukrainians who've got javelin anti-tank weapons and

end-laws supplied by the Brits. Thousands of them. The bingo space has already crossed off, Gordon. Well, I'm going to go again because the Brits gave a lot of end-laws in the months before, which are these shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles. So what they realized they could do is you've got this column coming at you, you could hide in the forests on the side of the road and you can pop out and in a sense all you have to do, in a way it's so obvious, it's crazy, is take out the first vehicle

and the last vehicle and the fuel trucks and these columns are stuck. You know, these massive columns actually suddenly can't move in the way that they thought they could. It was the mud season, was it not at this point in the war? So it was very difficult for the Russians to move off of the roads. Right? I mean, they couldn't actually get the first armored vehicle out. Do I take that down? Getting that off the road or moving everything else around it in that kind

of muddy Machmeier was, was extremely challenging. And so that column, I still remember seeing video of that column from the opening days of the war and it was just like sitting there. It just, it just stopped. Didn't it just stopped? It's crazy. And so they've got the end laws, they've got some Turkish drones and you start seeing these videos of the Russian armor being taken out, which is also a big boost for morale and these videos start to go out on social media.

So again, a bit like hosta where you had the one guy with his, you know, his surface to air missile missile taking out a helicopter You start to get This notion that it is possible that Ukraine can resist and I think it's really interesting isn't it? You've got Zelensky as an individual But you've also got these just these individual moments whether it's a host Amel Whether it's some of these videos of tanks being taken out which just change morale and flip things where people go, maybe we can do this. Maybe it's not going to be a walk over for the Russians, as everyone

thought. And that is going to be crucial in in stiffening the spine, I think, of so many Ukrainians that they can fight back and they may be able to stop this massive Russian army that's been invading them. And I guess this is also the start below the waterline of a massive intelligence sharing effort to help the Ukrainians target everything from these end laws, javelins, all the way up to more kind of strategic missiles and rockets, right? I mean, this is, this is the effort beginning where CIA MI6 Western intelligence services are beginning to really

be joined at the hip with the Ukrainians as part of the war effort. Now, of course, there had been, you know, we talked about this in that emergency episode, you know, a few weeks back on intel sharing with the Ukrainians, right? I mean, there had been a budding and deepening relationship between the CIA and the Ukrainians in the years prior to this, but this is where it starts to become like a joint war effort in some respects between the intelligence communities in both countries. The other factor which I think we should talk about is this also reflects a Russian intelligence failure doesn't it?

Because essentially they got their intelligence wrong. They were expecting to be welcomed because they thought that this was a country which was actually wanting the Russians to overthrow a corrupt regime of, you know, Nazis or however Putin put it. And that intelligence failure on the Russian part is going to be absolutely pivotal to the story of why the invasion fails. They definitely got Ukraine wrong, which is, I guess, in some respects striking because it's right next door. There's linguistic and cultural connections and you would think on the face of it that there would have been a more granular understanding of some of these dynamics in Ukraine. Although you do wonder if this is a case where a lot of sort of mid-level and working level

FSB Russian intelligence officers maybe understood these dynamics, but were either too afraid to say it to superiors or just didn't say it to superiors, right? Period. If none of this information made it into this small circle of kind of war planners who were being told, as you said, that the Ukrainians were going to greet them, you know, with flowers as sort of liberators. So you do have that. You have this kind of sleepers who were supposed to go out and conduct a whole bunch of assassinations and kind of decapitation work in the early hours and days of the war, including targeting Zelensky. A lot of that, Gordon, seems like it just kind of dissolved, went away, that these networks

that presumably the FSB had paid and run, they just kind of didn't pan out when the time came. You're right. There's a kind of different layers of bad intelligence failure on the Russian part. There's the kind of analytic failure that they think the Ukrainians want them to come. And, you know, that goes back to Putin's essay that, you know, no one's willing's willing to challenge the leader's idea, are they, that we're one people and that the Ukrainians are Russians and therefore won't fight. So there's definitely a problem that there's an analytic failure there and a military planning

failure. One person said to me, you could tell this was a plan created by a conspiratorial cabal of KGB officers because basically it was a plan cooked up by conspiratorial cabal of KGB officers, because basically it was a plan cooked up by a few people at the top, never really communicated through the military or assessed on the ground, but just given the orders at the last minute and the forces weren't prepared. So there was a failure at that level. They're wrong about Ukrainian leadership.

They're wrong about Ukrainian military capabilities. they're wrong about their own capabilities. But yes, I think that other bit is really interesting as well, because the Russians do appear to have had a clear plan to decapitate Ukraine effectively, and to have, they thought, laid the groundwork for that through their intelligence services. One thing worth saying is that it was the FSB, which is the Russian security service, which was in charge of this, not as you might think the SBR foreign intelligence service or the GRU military intelligence. Well, they're one country, Gordon. So of course they have the domestic service working on it, right?

Yeah. It's the equivalent of MI5, you know, or the FBI doing this because it's the near abroad in Putin's mind. So this is kind of FSB. And there's one particular bit of the FSB, the fifth service or service five under Sergey Berseda, which was tasked with collecting the intelligence on Ukraine. And it had spent, I think, a long time building networks in Ukraine, putting its people on the ground, buying agents, developing politicians who they thought were going to be loyal to Moscow, having proxies ready to take over. They had this planned and it didn't work. It's fascinating, I guess, just how multi-layered then the intelligence failure is because it

is an analytic failure, as we've talked about, And it's also a failure at the level of the collection, right? Because the guys who are recruiting these agents and presumably have attempted to gain some measure of influence or control over them, have objectively failed in that task to have so thin of a level of control over these networks that as soon as things start to tip the other way, they're just, they're just gone. So it's somewhat interesting when you compare it to other noteworthy intelligence failures, which are oftentimes sort of purely analytical, right? To have missed a call in this one, it's a failure sort of up and down the line on the Russian intelligence side. It's a failure sort of up and down the line on the Russian intelligence side.

What all of this means is that that Russian plan, which was, you know, it's all over in three or four days, be a parade in Kiev, it's going to fail. Those amazing details you remember from the time is that in those burnt out Russian vehicles on the road to Keith, they find parade uniforms and even musical instruments for the marching bands because the Russians are so convinced that, you know, they're just going to waltz in, the country's going to collapse. You know, they're there for the parade. They're not really there to fight. That's the reality of what they think.

Packed three pair of underpants and a tuba and gotten a tank. And instead they get an N-Law in a burnt out tank. So after three or four days, the Russian plan hasn't worked. They haven't got a plan B. Let's come back after the break and we'll see where that leads and just look at that pivotal role that intelligence played in the run up during the invasion and afterwards. This episode is brought to you by FX's Dying for Sex on Disney+. Based on the podcast of the same name, Dying for Sex tells the story of Molly, who is diagnosed

with stage 4 breast cancer. Determined to feel everything she can before she can't feel anything, she decides to leave her unhappy marriage to explore her sexuality with some encouragement from her best friend Nicky. FX's Dying for Sex, streaming April 4th only on Disney+. Sign up now at Disneyplus.com. Hello, I'm William Durrimple. And I'm Anita Arnand. And we are the hosts of Empire, also from Goalhanger. And we're here to tell you about our recent miniseries that we've just done on The Troubles.

In it, we try to get to the very heart of the violent conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the 1960s all the way up to 1998. It's something that we both lived through and remember from our childhoods, but younger listeners may not know anything about it. It's the time when there was division along religious and political lines. Neighbours turned against each other, residential city streets became battlegrounds, thousands were killed, and the IRA bombed London. It seemed as if an end was out of reach, but in 1998 a peace process finally brought those 30 years of violence to an end. But the memory of the troubles is still present, not only within Northern Irish communities who experienced it, but in international relations and political approaches to peace. New audiences are starting to understand this national trauma through films like Belfast

and kneecap and TV shows like Derry Girls. In fact, our guest on the mini-series is Patrick Raddon Keefe. Now, he's the author of the non-fiction book that inspired the hit TV drama Say Nothing. It's one of my favorite books. It's, I think, the kind of inkhole blood for our generation, extraordinary work of non-fiction. And if you'd like to hear more about this very recent conflict that put Northern Ireland on the global stage and hear from Patrick Radden-Keefe, we've left a clip of the mini-series at the end of this episode.

To hear the full series, just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. So we've looked at how Russian intelligence got things wrong, haven't we, David? But that failure of assessment of how the opening stages of the war might play out, how Ukraine might fare, I mean, that was also a failure on the Western side and on the American and British side as well, wasn't it? Well, it is a good question, right? Would you call it an intelligence failure? I'm not sure.

Here is what's true, for sure. It seems that even though the CIA got the call probably spot-on with respect to the run-up to the invasion and that Putin was serious and that he was going to do it, I mean there's sort of the lead-up bit was phenomenally done, right, from an analytic standpoint. It does seem like the CIA, I think most Western services, probably made some analytical errors that have cousins on the Russian side, right, or sort of similar to the way the Russians viewed the situation. I don't think the CIA felt that Kiev would fall in three days necessarily, like Putin seemed to. But it does seem that the agency felt that the Ukrainians would not be able to

withstand a Russian assault, that it was likely the leadership, including Zelensky, may flee or might at least leave the Capitol, right, and cede that to the Russians. And it seems like there was a pretty significant overestimation of Russian military capabilities. And I think that bit is really, really important because it seems, again, you know, from the outside that the nitty gritty picture of how corrupt and hollowed out bits of the Russian

military were in particular really basic stuff like how do you maintain heavy equipment, how do you service heavy equipment, do you have enough equipment like cranes and forklifts to move pallets around, do you have the right kind of tires on your armored vehicles that you can replace? Like all of this kind of basic stuff, it really seems like at an analytic level, the agency either probably wasn't able to put this big picture together to show that Putin's war machine was not going to be as effective as anybody thought it would be. That seems to have eluded us on the American side.

Both Putin's war machine, how effective it was, and I think the Ukrainian ability to resist, that was underestimated. Because the big question we're looking at, and I guess our whole podcast is interesting, is how much does intelligence matter? When does this really make a difference? And in this case, I think we've looked at lots of ways in which it did make a difference positively and clearly the ability to warn the Ukrainians even if they didn't always listen to build support marks. All of that mattered, but the misassessment about whether Ukraine could resist, I do think, may not be a failure, you know, a mistake did have some

consequences because if the West had thought that the Ukrainians could resist, perhaps they might have armed them more or better or differently or supported them in a different way if they didn't just assume they collapse. I also think there's a sense in which the West was so worried about escalation with Russia that it lets Putin to some extent call the shots because they think, well, the Ukrainians are going to collapse. My impriority is avoid World War III rather than think what can we do to help the Ukrainians win?

And this is the criticism you hear. You know, I've heard it from Ukrainian officials when I've been in Kiev, where they say the US was doing enough to make sure we didn't lose, but not enough to help us win because they were too worried about escalating with Russia. So there is that question about whether the estimation of the Ukrainian ability to resist, but also how dangerous it was to provoke Russia, whether that was right. I mean, I remember on the Sunday, I think after the invasion, I remember it vividly how dangerous it was to provoke Russia, whether that was right. I mean, I remember on the Sunday, I think, after the invasion, I remember it vividly because a kind of news alert dropped saying Putin moves his nuclear forces to kind of

combat ready status or something, which made it sound like, you know, World War Three was going to kick off and people were saying to me, you know, tell us what this means. It was essentially a bluff. It was Putin knowing the war was going badly, badly going I'm going to play my nuclear card and to try and use it to prevent the West supporting Ukraine more. So that intelligence assessment is Russia bluffing. How far can you push Putin? How much can you arm Ukraine? How much can you support Ukraine without starting World War Three? I completely accept that's a hard call, but I think if there was a criticism of the US and maybe some others as well is that they didn't always get that

assessment right then and afterwards, even if they certainly got the intelligence right about the Russian plan in the run-up. I will say, I mean just to kind of defend my analytic cohort, you know, brethren at the Central Intelligence Agency. You think about the kinds of intelligence questions that frame assessments, right? It could be anything from do the Russians have this piece of, you know, weaponry in kind of their arsenal? out weaponry in kind of their arsenal. You could have questions that are harder, like what actually is the Russian war plan and what does, how did the Russians envision that happening? But you go up to the level of a question like, what would be the outcome of a war

between Russia and Ukraine and how might that go? And again, I would argue that you're getting to something that's almost actually impossible to predict. The best you can really do is to craft realistic scenarios for how that might unfold, and to then put into those analytic products, a set of signposts that allow the policymakers to understand into which one we might be drifting. And I will say that that kind of assessment, I'm sure, was done in the run-up to the war.

But it was probably also the case that the analysts would be pushed and certainly senior CIA officials in meetings in the Oval or the Situation Room or elsewhere would be pushed to say, which one of these do you think is the most likely, right? Which one of these are we most likely headed toward? And it does seem there that that overestimation of Russian capabilities and planning, the underestimation on the Ukrainian side, probably led the CIA to say, look, Putin is being optimistic, but he's probably going to get most of what he wants in a couple months or something like that. I don't think anyone foresaw as the baseline scenario, although I would bet it was one of the three or four that they put down on paper that we would be in a protracted conflict like this.

in a protracted conflict like this. But I think that's fair. And I think it's probably also fundamentally the decision on how far to go and how much to arm Ukraine and how much to compete in this fundamentally also a political decision. It's informed by intelligence, but that's the kind of Biden administration. I think President Biden and Jake Sullivan, his national security advisor particularly, it was down to them and their risk appetite, how far to go. So I think if you stand back, I guess where what we're saying is intelligence played a massive role in what happened in the run up to war.

And in those opening days, even with all that intelligence, it was impossible to stop the war, but I guess if Putin is set on it and if he was set on it, which is what the intelligence said, that was always going to be hard. But still, the benefits of having that intelligence and sharing it were that I think it disrupted that Russian narrative. It prevented Russia controlling the narrative internationally and it helped rally support for Ukraine. And back to that kind of pivotal opening weeks, it meant that European countries, particularly, I think, were not going to buy the Russian narrative that they were doing this to defend

Russian speakers who were being attacked, you know, as the provocation, the false flag alleged. But actually, this was always the Russian plan. And suddenly, the fact even that the, you know, the French and the Germans had been wrong, made them, I think, even more willing to take a harder line then when they'd been shown to be wrong, made them, I think, even more willing to take a harder line then when they'd been shown to be wrong and the intelligence had proved to be right. And so you did get a really strong coalescing of a coalition to support Ukraine, which along with the Ukrainian ability and willingness to resist does mean again that there is a support for Ukraine that maybe people hadn't expected.

And that does help sustain Ukraine, I think, you know, in the longer term. To have expected the intelligence to have done much more than it did would be to expect intelligence to be something other than what it is, right? Because what it is is it provides a country and its policymakers with an information advantage. That's the goal of the intelligence. Even with that information advantage, right? I mean, let's take the simpler case of,

could the intel have stopped the war? Well, no, in this case. I mean, better intelligence would not have stopped the war because what it came down to was not an information advantage. What it came down to was, were we willing to put so much risk into the system and effectively tell Putin that if you invade Ukraine, you will be in a direct shooting war with the United States to have effectively provided a security guarantee to Ukraine is probably what it would have required to stop the war. And it may not have even stopped the war, by the way, because he may not have

believed it, but that's not an intelligence picture, right? That is politics. That is negotiation. That's operating at a different level. So the intelligence certainly would not have stopped the war. I think where it, the counterfactual becomes a bit more interesting is if Biden and his senior advisors had been told consistently that this is going to be like 10 times worse than Afghanistan for Russia. Or if that had been the picture provided to the White House, the planning in the early days around the weaponry provided to the Ukrainians, the covert support provided to the Ukrainians, that may have been a different calculation.

And I think that's the critical bit. But to have expected the CIA to have gotten that right before the war started again, is maybe asking a bit more than any intelligence agency can really provide. And what you see, I guess, after the initial failure of the Russian plan, we then head for this long war in which intelligence support, particularly from the US, also the UK becomes critical in helping sustain Ukraine. And we've talked about that in, you know, our emergency podcast about the kinds of tactical intelligence, you know, the satellite imagery, the targeting data, all

of that, which becomes critical. I guess as we come to a close, it is interesting. I mean, we're recording this in towards the end of March and Becky, one of our producers just spotted as well a news article today saying that Russia in its talks has named one of the negotiators to be Sergey Berseda, who is the former head of the fifth Erectorate, which oversaw that intelligence failure in Ukraine at the start of the invasion. I mean, it's fascinating. Putin is clearly, despite the failure of the FSB at the start, is still trusting him to be one of the negotiators in any potential talks. Now, look, by the time this comes out, who knows where the

talks might be? But I guess one critical point is whether A, Russia understands Ukraine any better now. I'm not sure, but also I think if you go back to the origins of the story, it's about Putin's intent for regime change in Kiev, isn't it? That's what this was driven by. You know, you go back to that essay of July, 2021. It's the idea Russia and Ukraine are one country, a single historical and spiritual space, all the signs are Putin has not let go of that view. He's not going to let go of that view. So even if there is a ceasefire, even if there's some kind of deal, I think the concern is

his ambition will not have changed, will not be diminished. His desire to install a government in Kiev, which is pliant and effectively a puppet for Moscow. Well, that's right. And I think it is maybe a good place to close Gordon that many of the questions, the intelligence questions that were posed three years ago about Putin's plans and intentions and Zelensky's sort of, you know, political acumen and courage and they're all the same. These questions are still important to Western intelligence services to provide

the best possible information to their policymakers about the war in Ukraine, the potential for negotiations to end the war and all manner of questions around it. to end the war and all manner of questions around it. So maybe there Gordon will, will end our exploration of intelligence and the early days of the war in Ukraine. And I should note as well, Gordon, that listeners who want to provide you in particular with feedback, with, if you have feedback for Gordon Carrera in particular, please send us a note, send it to us at therestisclassified at goalhanger.com, the rest is classified

at goalhanger.com, positive feedback only. Gordon insists. More questions, anything you want to know, what you thought we covered or didn't cover in this and what you're interested in this is a chance to get in touch we would like to hear from you even if it's not just positive comments from me well David thanks for everyone for listening and I guess we'll see you next time we'll see you next time So here's a clip from our series on the troubles. This is the strangest thing about this story is that Northern Ireland is so small. And listen, there are other I mean, you could tell a similar story about Sarajevo or any

number of other types of places where there's been a conflict, Rwanda, and then the conflict ends and everybody still kind of lives in the same community. of other types of places where there's been a conflict, Rwanda, and then the conflict ends and everybody still kind of lives in the same community and you see these people. But, you know, there's an instance, even as adults, where Helen McConville was with her own family in McDonald's and sees one of the people who abducted her mother.

There's a moment that I describe in the book where Michael McConville actually gets into the back of a black taxi in Belfast as an adult and he sees in the mirror in the front of the taxi, he realizes that the man driving him is one of the people who decades earlier abducted his mother. And the strangest, most eerie aspect of this is he doesn't say anything. And he doesn't even know if that guy recognizes him. And they drive in silence and then he just pays the guy's money and leaves. To hear the full series, just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts.