Four years later, Russia continues to bear the cost of a deadly misjudgment in Ukraine.

 

A photo illustration depicts Russian President Vladimir Putin set against the backdrop of the Russian flag

In the early hours of February 24, 2022, as I stood on the freezing roof of a hotel in Kyiv, the notion that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine still felt almost unthinkable — even with tens of thousands of troops massed along the border.

It was true that Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin’s strongman, had grown accustomed to projecting Russia’s hard power. Campaigns in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria, along with military action in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, had brought him strategic gains at comparatively low cost.

But invading the second-largest country in Europe, after Russia itself, seemed an entirely different order of risk — a move so potentially catastrophic that one might expect even a calculating strategist like Putin to hesitate.

Apparently not, I recall thinking, as I fumbled with my flak jacket and missiles began striking the Ukrainian capital.

The past four years of war have shattered more than one flawed assumption — chief among them the once widely held belief, even among Kyiv’s allies, that Ukraine was too weak and too disorganized to withstand a full-scale invasion.

At the same time, the aura of invincibility that long surrounded Russia’s formidable military has been significantly diminished.

Research by the think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) suggests that when the Kremlin launched what it termed its “Special Military Operation,” it anticipated seizing control of Ukraine in just 10 days.

More than 1,450 days later, that expectation appears strikingly naïve — a profound miscalculation that has exacted a staggering toll in suffering, destruction, and loss of life.