FORECAST SERIES: Putin’s likely course of action in Ukraine (Part 1)

Strategic Misdirection: An Alternate Framework for Understanding Russia's Play in Ukraine

Summary:

Russian President Vladimir Putin is amassing a military force on and near Ukraine’s borders large enough to conduct a full-scale invasion. Western intelligence agencies have reportedly intercepted Russian military plans to do so by early February. Visible Russian military activities and these plans so clearly support preparations for an invasion that it seems obvious that Putin really might invade if his demands are not met.

Putin is rarely so obvious, however, and a massive Russian invasion of Ukraine would mark a fundamental transformation of the approach he has taken for two decades to advance his interests and respond to threats. We cannot dismiss the possibility that such a transformation has occurred. The United States, NATO, and Ukraine must seriously consider the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine and prepare military, diplomatic, and economic measures to deter and respond to that threat.

But Putin may have no intention of invading Ukraine at all. Putin may be attempting a strategic misdirection that impales the West in a diplomatic process and military planning cycle that will keep it unprepared to meet his preferred, wily, and more subtle next move. Putin benefits greatly by focusing attention on the risk of war and prompting the current US scramble to defuse and de-escalate this crisis that he invented. If Putin is threatening military action to misdirect, then the West’s concessions will feed directly into his non-military efforts to achieve his objectives of changing the geopolitical orientation of Ukraine from west to east and weakening NATO.

This report, the first in a series, examines the political, military, and informational situations in Ukraine and Belarus; the military and informational situations in Russia as they relate to this crisis; and the informational and diplomatic situations in the West.

• Primary Source

• Alternative Source

ESO Records

AEI: Forecast Series, 2022: Putin’s likely course of action in Ukraine (Part 2) https://www.europeansources.info/record/forecast-series-putins-likely-course-of-action-in-ukraine-part-2/

AEI: Forecast Series, 2022: Putin’s likely course of action in Ukraine (Part 3) https://www.europeansources.info/record/forecast-series-putins-likely-course-of-action-in-ukraine-part-3/

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