KYIV—Until the very last moment and despite harboring no illusions whatsoever towards the Kremlin, Ukraine did not believe Russia would invade. Why was that? A good number of Ukrainians recently told me about their experience for a story focused on the weeks before the beginning of the invasion, and I wanted to share a few things I’ve noted while talking with them:
The trap of rationality. One major reason people did not believe in the all-out-invasion scenario was that Moscow, they assessed, did not have enough forces for a multi-axis offensive, especially if it involved taking the capital. It was true of course, as the following weeks and months proved. But whether Russia had enough forces to take and control Ukraine did not really matter—the important question was whether Vladimir Putin believed Russia had enough forces to take and control Ukraine. And Putin had made clear numerous times he saw Ukraine as a failed state propped up by the US where a puppet regime oppressed a silent majority of pro-Russian people.
The trap of experience. This one can be summed up with one sentence: “we’ve been at war for eight years already”. It’s a sentence you heard very often in Ukraine in January and February, both from officials and normal citizens. Zelensky himself used this line on January 19, downplaying the threat after Joe Biden said he believed Putin had decided to “move in” on Ukraine. “What, exactly, is new? Hasn’t this been a reality for 8 years? Didn’t the invasion begin in 2014? Did the threat of a large-scale war appear now?” the Ukrainian president asked. This was compounded by the widely-held belief that, if something happened, it would almost certainly be an escalation in the Donbas region. People said it in frontline areas as well, confident that whatever happened would be more of the same.
The power of institutions. While most people did not believe in the idea of an invasion, many of these people nevertheless took steps to prepare for the eventuality. In many cases, it was because they were part of institutions like companies, NGOs or newsrooms where there was some kind of rule or social pressure that encouraged them to make contingency plans (a Ukrainian journalist told me about a meeting they had on the Sunday before the Russian invasion precisely about those contingency plans—he was really unhappy about spending his Sunday at the office, but still went through with it). The relentless media noise also played a role: while a lot of people shared Zelensky’s irritation with Washington’s apocalyptic warnings, it nevertheless encouraged people to do something—prepare emergency bags, locate the closest bomb shelters, think of some escape plan.
The power of experience. In some cases, the social pressure went the other way: a Ukrainian language teacher in Kyiv told me how several of her friends laughed when they heard that she and her husband had gone to the supermarket to stock up on water, food and oil. Reports had just appeared about the U.S embassy leaving Kyiv on February and, while she didn’t really believe Russia would invade either, this teacher and her husband had the memory of being forced to flee their native city of Luhansk after it was seized by Russia-backed separatists. That was enough to get her to prepare.
Something to read
Rzeczpospolita (in Polish) / Research: the attitude of Poles towards refugees from Ukraine is changing (some really interesting polling data on how Polish people perceive Ukrainian refugees one year into the war. Here’s a short, automatically-translated quote on what the authors call “Positive Attitude Dissonance”: “The results of our public opinion polls show that the positive attitude of Poles towards Ukrainians has practically not changed since the beginning of the war. However, when we asked the additional question "Has your attitude towards refugees from Ukraine changed in the last 6 months, i.e. since June 2022?", as many as a quarter of the respondents answered "yes". Moreover, 68% of them declared that the direction of change was negative, so their attitudes had deteriorated.”)
Association for Research into Crimes against Art / Ukraine's very own "Arsène Lupin" is sentenced to five years in French prison (this story has absolutely nothing to do with the war, but I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to share an art crime story that happens to be linked to Ukraine)
European Association of Archaeologists / Archaeological heritage as a target during war (“The most significant and dominant formations within the historical landscape suffer the greatest damage due to the fact that they are often placed in the most convenient locations for the construction of modern fire and defence positions. It should be mentioned that among the significant challenges for Ukrainian archaeology is the use of archaeological sites as military objects as well as illegal excavations in occupied territories, the looting of regional museums and the increased sale of archaeological artefacts.”)
Something else worth checking out
This impressive map of Russian fortifications set up all along the frontline and border.
I see the 2 traps as a way to be inconciencly in denial about what might happen, while Ukrainian life continued as normal just before the war and in the meanwhile troops were massing in Belarus. In that case, you find logical arguments about why nothing will change to confort you.